American artist Paul McCarthy will return to London this week for a four-day programme bringing together his pioneering video works and long-running experimental music practice across Rio Cinema and Cafe OTO in Dalston.
Presented by I-D.A Projects in association with McCarthy Studios, the programme opens this Thursday, 9th July, with a rare cinema screening spanning more than five decades of the artist’s practice before continuing with a three-night residency at Cafe OTO from 10th–12th July.
McCarthy will personally introduce a career-spanning selection of films made between 1970 and 2025, ranging from the early Black and White Tapes to the UK premiere of Mother, a newly completed episode from his ongoing A&E project created with German actress Lilith Stangenberg.
The Rio Cinema programme includes Ma Bell (1971), Face Painting – Floor, White Line (1972), Whipping a Wall with Paint (1974) and Sailor’s Meat (1975), concluding with Mother (2022/25). Shown together in a cinema setting, the works chart the evolution of an artist whose performances, films and installations have consistently pushed at the boundaries of the body, identity and cultural mythmaking.
Begun in 2019, A&E is an episodic multidisciplinary collaboration with Stangenberg that moves across performance, theatre, video and installation. The project continues McCarthy’s long-standing exploration of power, violence, fantasy and the darker structures that underpin everyday social life.
Following the screening, McCarthy shifts from film to sound with a three-night residency at Cafe OTO, performing vocals and guitar alongside longtime collaborators from the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) and its influential subgroup Extended Organ.
The residency features Joe Potts, Rick Potts and Alex Stevens, with guest appearances across the weekend from Nathaniel Mellors, Charles Hayward and David Toop. Support performances come from DREAM_MEGA, Classic Form Morf, Agate, Nik Colk Void and National Rails, alongside DJ sets from Keel Her, Simon Parris and Charles Bullen.
McCarthy’s relationship with LAFMS stretches back to the late 1970s, when members of the experimental noise collective shared studios with the artist in Pasadena. He later co-founded Extended Organ with Joe Potts, Tom Recchion and Fredrik Nilsen, while the late Mike Kelley was a member of the group between 2000 and 2012.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential American artists of the post-war period, McCarthy first emerged through performance and video before expanding into sculpture, installation and large-scale immersive environments. Throughout his career, he has examined the myths and contradictions of American culture through works that are often provocative, absurd and psychologically unsettling.
The London programme offers a rare opportunity to experience both sides of McCarthy’s practice: the groundbreaking videos that helped redefine performance art in the 1970s, and the experimental music that has remained a parallel thread throughout his career.
Paul McCarthy: Selected Video Works, 1970–2025 takes place at Rio Cinema on 9th July 2026,
followed by a residency at Cafe OTO from 10th–12th July 2026.
Please note the Rio Cinema screening is recommended for audiences aged 18 and over and may contain disturbing or offensive imagery.
About
Paul McCarthy is widely considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. Born in 1945 and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multifaceted practice that sought to break the limitations of painting through performance, film, video and the use of unorthodox materials, including food, bodily fluids and industrial substances.
Across performance, photography, film, video, sculpture, drawing, painting and installation, McCarthy’s work has examined the myths, fantasies and cultural structures that shape American life. His practice often draws on Hollywood, television, consumer culture, politics, philosophy, art history and popular entertainment, exposing the instability, violence and absurdity beneath familiar images and social rituals.
During the 1990s, McCarthy expanded his practice into large-scale installations and sculptural figures, working with materials including fibreglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. The human figure, present or implied, has remained central to his work, appearing through the artist’s own body, invented characters and collaborations with artists including Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades and Damon McCarthy.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from the University of Southern California in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced generations of West Coast artists. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally.
The Los Angeles Free Music Society is a seminal West Coast experimental noise collective formed in the mid-1970s as part of the international DIY movement. Its members developed independent systems for producing and distributing music, sound works and related visual material. McCarthy’s connection with LAFMS began in Pasadena in the late 1970s, when members of the collective worked in the same building as the artist.
Extended Organ was formed in 1995 by Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Paul McCarthy and Fredrik Nilsen as an experiment in sonic interaction and drone-based performance. Mike Kelley was a member of the group between 2000 and 2012, and Alex Stevens has been a member since 2011.
Taking its name from the titles of two 1960s experimental music LPs, Extended Voices and A Second Wind for Organ, the group developed around Joe Potts’ self-engineered drone instrument, the “Chopped Optigan”, and McCarthy’s primal vocal performances.
