Monumental Paul McCarthy Sculpture Installed in St. Moritz

The work epitomizes the McCarthy’s working practice in that its origins hark to an earlier work: a figure that McCarthy first sculpted when he was fifteen years old, in 1960 – 1961. The precocious teenager made the original free-form plaster sculpture, which stands only 20 centimeters high, without intentional reference to the works of Henry Moore. It was only when McCarthy revisited the work at a later date that he was struck by the resemblance to the British sculptor’s abstracted human figures, and consequently titled the miniature ‘Henry Moore.'

Bruce Nauman, who has long been cited as one of McCarthy’s major influences, created an important work in 1967 entitled ‘Henry Moore Bound to Fail.’ The sculpture was based on a plaster cast of the artist’s own arms tied behind his back, literally ‘bound’ to fail as a working artist who was struggling to get out of the shadow of more established artists like Moore. McCarthy appropriated Nauman’s title for the resulting series of incredible variations on the early sculpture, exploring the form in a multitude of materials, colors, sizes and treatments. These variations include a gigantic, 15-meter-tall inflatable nylon version that perched on the roof of the Whitney Museum in New York — adopting the museum building as its pedestal — on the occasion of the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

An inflatable McCarthy sculpture is also being offered by Hauser & Wirth for the Badrutt’s Palace Charity Auction later this month.