Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank. The artist runs until exhaustion across a dirt field in what looks like a military site. Recorded for the camera, and projected on loop, the video performance was created for Documenta 14.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra depicts the artist standing naked in a lush field that a bulldozer has broken up. The video references an incident in which innocent Guatemalans were brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave.

Photography (Photography)

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works. Here, McCarthy squirts liquid out of a bottle held near his crotch onto a stuffed animal in the shape of a lion. The costuming, materials, and simulated bodily functions frequently appear in McCarthy’s work, which often disturbingly juxtaposes visceral and startling manipulation of the body with the cheerful artifacts of popular consumer culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle.

Photography (Photography)

Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.