Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is Phaidon's monograph on the artist, part of the publisher's Contemporary Artists series, first published in 1996 and reissued as a revised and expanded edition in 2016.

The original edition paired an interview by Kristine Stiles with survey essays by Ralph Rugoff and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, tracing McCarthy's performance, video, and sculpture from the 1970s onward. The 2016 edition adds essays by Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr and extends the survey through later works including Rebel Dabble Babble (2011), White Snow (2012), and Pandora's Box (2014).

McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City in 1945 and has worked in Los Angeles since the 1970s across performance, video, sculpture, and installation. His actions and installations draw on American entertainment culture, including Disneyland, B-movies, and television, alongside European precedents such as Viennese Actionism and Joseph Beuys. Phaidon describes the book as the first comprehensive survey of more than forty years of his practice.