C-print on aluminum
183 x 122 cm


Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room derives from the performance/installation "Piccadilly Circus", for which McCarthy created puppetlike characters, which refer to notable leaders of our time, with oversize masks and clownish costumes that give the figures a comical quality. The characters' instinctive and violent actions hint at powerful psychological disorders and related bodily dysfunction expressed through symptoms such as regression, self-destruction, and obsession. The performance is staged as a murderous game of hide-and-seek in a building with preinscribed meaning, namely a bank, which serves as an architectural readymade, or as Robert Storr has described it, "a bastion of respectability seized and vandalized, capitalism's inviolable precincts violated". The naked Queen (Elizabeth, Queen Mum) cowers at the back wall of a blank blue space, completely exposed in an impossible attempt at self-protection and refuge.


*1945 in Salt Lake City, USA I Living and working in Los Angeles, USA