Paul McCarthy News

Robert Wilson's The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic will have its U.S. premiere and its only New York performances in Park Avenue Armory's soaring Wade Thompson Drill Hall, December 12 - December 21, 2013.

The U.S. premiere of Massive Attack V Adam Curtis will open at Park Avenue Armory September 28. The epic work, created by film maker Adam Curtis and Robert Del Naja, will run through October 4 and is a co-commission of Park Avenue Armory, Manchester International Festival, and Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts.

The U.S. premiere of Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh's staging of MACBETH will take over Park Avenue Armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall in June 2014.

The First International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Cartagena de Indias is now accepting applications for COLOMBIA HOY, a major museum exhibition to be held for the duration of the Biennial from February 7 - April 7, 2014.

This June, Park Avenue Armory unveils a new large-scale installation and video project by artist Paul McCarthy, considered among the most provocative and influential voices in the international art world today. Drawing inspiration from the 19th-century German fairytale Snow White and McCarthy's ongoing exploration of American myths and icons, WS takes over the Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall from today, June 19 through August 4, 2013, and marks the Armory's seventh major visual art installation to date.

Casting has been announced for Matt Charman's new play, The Machine, which will have its U.S. premiere at Park Avenue Armory September 4-18 and its world premiere at Manchester International Festival July 10-21. Hadley Fraser will star as chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Fraser has recently starred as Sid in The Pajama Game at Chichester Festival Theatre and is known, amongst other roles, for his portrayal of Javert in Les Miserables in the West End. Francesca Annis will play Garry's mother, Clara. Recently seen on television in Cranford, Annis' film credits include Revolver, The Libertine, and Milk. The wunderkind engineer behind Deep Blue, Doctor Hsu will be played by Kenneth Lee, who starred in US comedy drama Delocated.

This June, Park Avenue Armory unveils a new large-scale installation and video project by artist Paul McCarthy, considered among the most provocative and influential voices in the international art world today. Drawing inspiration from the 19th-century German fairytale Snow White and McCarthy's ongoing exploration of American myths and icons, WS takes over the Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall from June 19 through August 4, 2013, and marks the Armory's seventh major visual art installation to date. The monumental installation weaves together a fantastical forest and a three-quarter-scale house modeled after McCarthy's own childhood home with multi-channel video projections to immerse visitors in a world of fantasy and depravity. A press preview for WS will be held at the Armory on June 18, 2013.

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed curator and scholar Paul Schimmel has been named a partner of the gallery. Schimmel joins Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot in leading an enterprise founded over 20 years ago. Described by The Financial Times as 'a marketplace of ideas', Hauser & Wirth has locations in Zurich, London and New York. Its program focuses upon significant contemporary artists and includes historical surveys and thematic group exhibitions that advance new dialogues about art. The gallery represents over 50 established and emerging contemporary artists, as well as the estates of Eva Hesse, Allan Kaprow, Josephsohn, Lee Lozano, Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth, Philippe Vandenberg and the Henry Moore Family Collection.

This June, Park Avenue Armory unveils a new large-scale installation and video project by artist Paul McCarthy, considered among the most provocative and influential voices in the international art world today. Drawing inspiration from the 19th-century German fairytale Snow White and McCarthy's ongoing exploration of American myths and icons, WS takes over the Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall from June 19 through August 4, 2013, and marks the Armory's seventh major visual art installation to date.

Hauser & Wirth announced today it will devote its entire spring program in New York City to Paul McCarthy, one of America's most challenging and influential artists, via three interrelated exhibitions and an outdoor sculpture presentation. McCarthy has garnered international acclaim for - and provoked lively critical debate with - a constantly evolving oeuvre characterized by wildly dark humor, Bacchanalian chaos, and tragicomic narratives that connect seemingly disparate bodies of work. His practice is notable for its breadth of forms and emphasis upon performance as a tool for breaching established boundaries between genres; using repetition and variation, he has mined his preoccupying themes across mediums and decades. McCarthy unleashes debauchery and desire with extreme technical daring, charting a territory where our fundamental impulses collide with our most cherished myths and hypocritical societal norms. His work locates the traumas lurking behind the gleaming stage set of the American Dream and identifies their analogs in accepted art history.

Art & Culture Highlights in Dusseldorf

Due to overwhelming demand, Park Avenue Armory announced today that it has added one additional performance, on Sunday, March 24 at 4pm, of Karlheinz Stockhausen's OKTOPHONIE to its schedule. Part of Stockhausen's magnum opus "Licht" (or "Light") OKTOPHONIE is a trailblazing electronic music experience where the audience is surrounded by eight groups of loudspeakers, enveloping them in a sonic environment. The Armory had originally scheduled six performances of the work, then added two others when the first six almost immediately sold out. The addition of the performance on March 24 at 4pm brings the total to nine performances. The eight other performances of OKTOPHONIE are completely sold out.

As the commissioning authority for the 55th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in 2013, Joke Schauvliege, the Flemish Minister of the Environment, Nature and Culture, has announced that Ghent-based artist Berlinde De Bruyckere will represent Belgium at the 118-year old international event. In her comments about this commission, The Minister cited De Bruyckere's profound commitment to exploring universal issues of the human condition, as well as the relationship of her art to the great continuum of history. Over the past three decades, De Bruyckere has created a consistent body of work that is still evolving and has the power to transform her participation in the Biennale into a lasting international presence.

2013 Season to Feature a Range of Groundbreaking, Genre-Bending, and Immersive Commissions and Presentations

Hauser & Wirth presents Dieter Roth Björn Roth in New York, 18th Street, 23 January - 13 April 2013.

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, collagist, poet, diarist, graphic designer, publisher, filmmaker and musician, German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998) has been described as "a performance artist in all the mediums he touched." Everything Roth made involved the acting out a central concept of art and life as utterly indivisible - a single enterprise in which material stuff is subservient to the emotional and sensual experience for which it stands. Roth was not an artist who tolerated boundaries. In seeking to pulverize them, he elevated the processes by which things happen, embracing accidents, mutations, and accretions of detail over time; inviting nature to have its way with unstable mediums, including fruit, chocolate, and sugar; and perhaps most boldly, inviting the dilution of his own authorship through constant, intensive collaboration with other artists. Those partners included such significant figures as Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. But it was Roth's long and symbiotic collaboration with his own son, artist Bjorn Roth, that stands as testament to the enormous and enduring potency of his restless, relentless process.

"NYC 1993" looks at art made and exhibited in New York over the course of one year, providing a synchronic panorama in which established artists and emerging figures of the time are presented alongside the work of authors whose influence has since faded from the discussion. Centering on the year 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" will be on view at the New Museum from February 13-May 26, 2013.

fortyfivedownstairs announces upcoming events: The McNeil Project has critics and audiences raving, Un:sighted is an all abstract affair, and come August we're all ears with a musical smorgasboard set to delight - classical compositions, satirical revue and sing along doo wop tunes.