PAUL McCARTHY
SS EE SAINT SANTA EVA ELF
DRAWING SESSIONS 2025
WITH LILITH STANGENBERG
21 March – 30 May 2026
One of the leading contemporary American artists of his generation, Paul McCarthy has developed a distinct and subversive artistic practice throughout his career, which now spans more than five decades. This exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Paris presents works in a new series by the artist entitled ‘SS EE Saint Santa Eva Elf,’ comprising large-scale drawings and a new six-channel video installation. Marking the latest chapter in McCarthy’s ongoing collaboration with German actress Lilith Stangenberg as a continuation of his acclaimed A&E series, this new body of work sees the artist return to one of his most potent and enduring motifs, Santa Claus. McCarthy recasts the beloved holiday icon as a vessel for an unflinching examination of corporate capitalism and the spectre of fascism.
Known for visceral, transgressive and politically incisive yet humorous work across a variety of media, McCarthy has long sought to parody social hierarchies and cultural conventions, explore power relations and challenge the art historical canon. In ‘Saint Santa Eva Elf’, abbreviated to the pointedly resonant ‘SS EE’, McCarthy and Stangenberg appear as Santa and the Elf, two figures whose seemingly innocent cultural familiarity belies a darker underbelly. For McCarthy, Santa is nothing less than the god of capitalism, and capitalism itself a form of psychosis that spreads through the rituals of commercialized culture. The Elf, Santa’s compatriot, operates as an independent and enigmatic figure: at once alien, accomplice and autonomous agent.
The series continues the landmark ‘A&E’ project begun in 2019, in which McCarthy, with Stangenberg, has created drawings, films, theatrical performances, paintings and sculpture through freely improvised performative sessions. Where ‘A&E’ saw the pair transformed into Adolf Hitler/Adam & Eva Braun/Eve, Saint Santa and Eva Elf transpose these explorations of power, entanglement and the grotesque onto the terrain of holiday mythology. Santa has been an essential part of McCarthy’s assembly of characters for over four decades, memorably deployed in his 1996 ‘Tokyo Santa’ series and in ‘Chocolate Shop’ at the Monnaie de Paris in 2014. This long-running interrogation deepens within this new body of work, informed by the intensity of the collaboration with Stangenberg and the charged architectural setting in which the performances were staged.
Sobre l’artista
PAUL McCARTHY
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.
Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist‘s own performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature, and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist-friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.
Current Exhibitions
1 / 12