Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

[1] Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy's main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them.

His points of reference are rooted, on the one hand, in things typically American, such as Disneyland, B-Movies, Soap Operas and Comics – he is a critical analyst of the mass media and consumer-driven American society and its hypocrisy, double standards and repression.

Such influences include the Lost Art Movement, Joseph Beuys, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, and the Viennese Actionism.

People make references to Viennese art without really questioning the fact that there is a big difference between ketchup and blood.

[7] Similarly, his work evolved from painting to transgressive performance art, psychosexual events intended to fly in the face of social convention, testing the emotional limits of both artist and viewer.

An example of this is his 1976 piece Class Fool, where McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup-spattered classroom at the University of California, San Diego until dazed and self-injured.

[12] During the summer of 2008, Paul McCarthy's inflatable Complex Shit, installed on the grounds of the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, Switzerland, took off in a wind, bringing down a power line, breaking a greenhouse window and a window at a children's home.

Originally, it was intended to be placed next to the concert hall at the locally famous "Schouwburgplein" square, but it never was.

This was due to controversies around the statue: The work is seen by many citizens as having sexual connotations, and, therefore it also is colloquially called "Butt plug Gnome".

The inflatable sculpture, standing 24 meters tall, was said to resemble a large green butt plug.

McCarthy created a life size comic figure exploring the relationship between modern culture, innocence and consumerism.