Win McCarthy
Innenportrait

25.02.–14.05.23

With Innenportrait, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Win McCarthy (b. 1986, US). In his practice, McCarthy explores the subjective understanding of his surroundings through reflections on a built environment. His works are often inhabited by personal and confessional ephemera that question the notion of intimacy. McCarthy works in various modes and media, in which the physiological act of seeing and experiencing daily life is filtered through forms of self-portraiture, underlining the hollowness and estrangement felt within a colorless and atomized metropolis.

The exhibition Innenportrait is composed entirely of new work, which focuses on the collision between opticality and intellect and evokes ideas around embodiment, perception, and remembrance. Sculptures made of conjoined prescription eyeglasses populate the rooms of the exhibition. They are the disembodied prostheses of collective vision, straining for clarity. Juxtaposed is a large series of photograms, which depict scenes both personal and universal: domestic interiors, cityscapes, a dog, the birth of a child. All are subtly distorted, either by hand or through collage, in order to further ideas around commonality and individuality.

Finally, various simple, provisional sculptures are installed in front of arrays of photographic lights. These works anticipate their own documentation and accept the primacy of the photograph. By making the photography equipment visible, McCarthy addresses the issue of how art and life are observed, documented, and proliferated. The unequivocal indirectness of one’s ever-shifting relationship to the subject matter is made palpable.

If subjectivity has been pivotal in McCarthy’s previous work, this new body of work presents a vision of contemporary subjective experience in disarray, in which seeing, understanding, and documenting collapse into one another.

McCarthy’s first publication, Common Ruin, which reflects his work through personal writings, accompanies the exhibition and is co-published with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Linda Franken

All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
All works © Win McCarthy, Installation view of the exhibition Win McCarthy – Innenportrait at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.

KW Studio with Win McCarthy and Léon Kruijswijk. Production: LOCOLOR , Realisation & Producer: Gregor Kuhlmann  Camera: Vincent Schaack, Jacqueline Olive D’Souza-Toulson,  Editing & Color Grading: Lia Valero.

On closer inspection, there was simply no edge to the photograph at all. Instead, there was only a constantly expanding field of inclusion. It just kept going and going. The more you looked, the more detail was available. Its panorama was so immense, so total, that everything was pictured. Its focal point was infinite. Periphery and center were one. There was no emphasis, only peace, and with that, a resounding unity. There was no depth of field whatsoever, just simultaneous resolution. Each color was also another, distinct yet interchangeable. And all relational possibilities existed simultaneously. Large was also small.

Wide was also narrow. Full was also empty. And yet these collapsed dualities had a groundedness about them. They felt natural, true to themselves, even, earthy. Since, yes, it was a landscape in some sense. It had to be, with all it contained. And there were individuals of every order and their infinite copies, but they were the same. Facade was the same as substrate. The most basic shapes, the building blocks, were no different than their wildest, most exaggerated embellishments. Yet, strange as it may sound, we saw all this with no feeling because, more strangely, nothing in this photograph, in all its infinite dimensionality, had any meaning associated with it. There was no possibility of recognition. No naming. Just supreme opticality, all therein touched by an exactly equal amount of light and shade. And stranger still, we, too, who were looking, we were included, and we were as seamlessly dispersed as all the rest. And we saw as one, and as another. No one was. Sight was diffused. Eyes were pictured but never looked through. There was no mind at all. But this had to be the case, because there was no distinction. All the ways of understanding that we had developed, all the devices, the modes, these were all superfluous. They were on view, of course, but they were of no utility. There was no use at all, only being. And all we had wondered about, whether it was all so simple or so infinitely complex, whether a line could exist without two points, whether, whether, whether. The answer was always “of course.” True was false. All was at once. And our feet were no different than the floor, and it went on and on, on and on like this, the unity, the oneness, the peace, on and on and on, but it didn’t mean there was no reason to look, or not to look. This was a photograph.

Artist Biography

Win McCarthy (b. 1986, US) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His practice includes installation, photography, and sculpture, and is often accompanied by an extensive writing process. McCarthy has presented solo exhibitions at Galerie Neu, Berlin (2021), at Atlantis, Marseille, and Svetlana, New York (both 2019), Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2018), Silberkuppe, Berlin (2017), and Off Vendome, Düsseldorf (2013). He furthermore participated in a number of group shows, among them I think I Look More like the Chrysler Building at Vleeshal, Middelburg (2021), Haunted Haus, Swiss Institute, New York (2020), Trouble in Paradise. Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019), Mirror Cells, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016), Takashi Murakami’s Superflat, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama (2016), and Puddle, pothole, porthole, SculptureCenter, New York (2014).