On Friday, December 13, 2013, 8. Salon will open an exhibition by Paul McCarthy (Los Angeles) and Andy Hope 1930 (Berlin) based on the myths and legends of the Western.
On show will be large-format lithographs by Paul McCarthy that create a venue of shadowy ravines and darkly expanding holes with rough sketches of all the heroes who, time and again, are eager to put their lives on the line in this landscape. McCarthy’s pictures strip down Wild West passions and celebrate the drive behind gripping a Colt as a show of uninhibited desire for the naked body – a speechless delight that heeds the call for action only to quickly plunge deep into the abysums of the flesh, a symbol of the one mystery that keeps us all in its thrall. Also on display will be a series of McCarthy’s drawings that present this drama in a more refined, yet still raw, form and a sculpture that sends the hot-tempered rider adrift through the materials of a toy world.
Also part of the setting: portraits and scenes by Andy Hope 1930. Like McCarthy, the artist from Berlin has discovered his cast of characters under the never-setting sun of films; his figures are the specters of a very specific yearning not active anywhere else. He bathes their pale faces in the glow of a color that announced pop long before art historians even had a name for it. Some of his characters Hope chases across the plains in the name of Suprematism, others – like the invincible woman who plays the role of the silver-tinged cowboy – are placed in the shadows of a bright melancholia.
Part of the showdown between the two artists takes place right in each other’s territory, for example when McCarthy cuts Hope’s characters into his own scenes and Andy Hope, in return, flanks the American’s presence in the exhibition space with an installation.
Neither the lithographs, which date back to 2006 and 2009, nor any of the other pieces have been shown in an exhibition context before. Most of the works were conceptualized specifically for Down Show Show Down.