“With Adolf (Hitler) & Eva (Braun), Adam & Eve, I wasn’t interested in historical accuracy. They’re not monuments. They’re buffoons. Pop buffoons, they’re images, languages.”
— Paul McCarthy
In a city where spectacle and politics blur by default, Paul McCarthy arrives like a cultural infection. A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, Drawing Sessions 2020–2022 with Lilith Stangenberg has taken over Bowman Hal, transforming the gallery into a theatre of grotesque parody and libidinal power play.
On view until 16 May, the exhibition brings together large-scale drawings and performance videos drawn from unscripted sessions between McCarthy and German actress Lilith Stangenberg. The result is raw, excessive and deliberately destabilising.
Adolf, Adam, Entertainment
A&E folds together Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, and Arts & Entertainment — collapsing fascist myth, biblical origin and pop spectacle into one unstable acronym. These figures aren’t historical reconstructions; they’re caricatures. Drunken, grotesque, interchangeable.
For McCarthy, fascism isn’t sealed in the past — it’s a structure that mutates through entertainment and image culture. As he puts it:
“Everything now exists inside pop culture. When we talk about pop, it’s not just Warhol or art history. It’s hamburgers, Disneyland, Americana, television, advertising. It’s the environment we live in. Politics doesn’t sit outside of that anymore—it functions inside it.”
— Paul McCarthy
Here, politics is spectacle and spectacle is politics. Fascism doesn’t return in uniform; it reappears as banality, parody, rerun.
Drawing as Collision
Created between 2020 and 2022, the drawings function less as representations than as evidence — records of live improvisation. No script. No fixed outcome. Just two bodies shifting through domination, seduction and reversal.
Meaning emerges through gesture and friction. McCarthy describes the process as trance-like, a merging of action and mark-making. The works feel feral, layered with contradiction. And to critics of their ugliness, he responds plainly:
“The work isn’t adding ugliness to the world. It’s responding to it.”
— Paul McCarthy
Fantasy, Power, Reversal
Stangenberg morphs into an Eve laced with Hollywood fantasy; McCarthy becomes the American fascist buffoon, absurd yet menacing. The exchange of roles destabilises easy binaries of good and evil. Fascism is not external or historical — it’s embedded in contemporary culture.
The project traces back to McCarthy’s engagement with Wilhelm Reich and a pivotal encounter with Stangenberg at Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. A shared fixation on The Night Porter cemented a collaboration built on instability and asymmetrical power, later evolving into the A&E series.
Two performance works will screen at Cineteca Matadero Madrid on 4 March, presented in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, followed by a conversation with the artist.
McCarthy’s practice has long dismantled comfort zones through satire and excess. In Madrid, A&E sharpens that attack: entertainment becomes ideology, parody masks violence, and pop culture reveals itself as the bloodstream through which power circulates.
The exhibition can be visited at Bowman Hal, within SOLO CSV, at Cuesta de San Vicente 36, Madrid, from 6 March to 16 May.
words Alexa Wang
