Curated by Massimiliano Gioni
To fully understand Paul McCarthy’s practice, one should consider the artist’s studio as a kind of sculpture itself—an object perpetually digesting and expunging the everyday grotesqueries of the American psyche. Pig Island—an expansive, debris-strewn installation that operates like a laboratory in which sculptural crossbreeds are conceived, molded, mechanized, and cannibalized—is the most efficient conceivable expression of this idea. Cultivated over the past seven years in the heart of McCarthy’s studio, this work, never before seen in its entirety, is to be exhibited alongside sculptures it has spawned. Also filling the eighteenth-century galleries of the Palazzo Citterio (specially reopened for this show) will be two recent video installations and several sculptures from the 1970s and ’80s, demonstrating that the anarchic impulses behind Pig Island have laced the artist’s materially driven output for decades.
