Anna McCarthy: Invisible Borders

In her new exhibition Invisible Borders, Anna McCarthy explores the forms in which borders arise, operate, and dissolve – politically, socially, emotionally, and materially. The works combine drawing and painting techniques with elements of collage and assemblage, focusing on an aesthetics of process. Most of the works were created in Munich and New York – partly in the studio, partly in public or outdoor spaces – and were deliberately exposed to the influences of weather and environment. Rain, wind, and sunlight left visible traces and thus became collaborators in the process of creation. The resulting surfaces oscillate between control and chance, between deliberate action and the letting go of artistic authority. This conscious act of exposure marks a fundamental dimension of McCarthy’s practice: the recognition of precarity as a productive condition and the willingness to engage with the unpredictable.

The exhibition unfolds around the motif of the garden – as a place of growth and care, but also of demarcation. Trellises, grids, and fences appear as recurring structures that imply order and stability yet are continually overgrown by organic processes. McCarthy examines the relationship between protection and permeability, between persistence and transformation.

Several works take up the butterfly as a motif – a symbol of metamorphosis, vulnerability, and freedom. In McCarthy’s visual language, it stands for the fleeting as well as for the moment of transformation itself – a fragile yet conscious form of self-empowerment. The recurrence of this motif is not merely formal but also personally charged: an intense, intimate experience – the unexpected moment of an encounter interwoven with loss and memory – becoming a figure through which grief, connection, and transformation touch. In queer contexts, it also points to forms of becoming beyond binary definitions.

Through the combination of diverse – at times contradictory – materials, aesthetics, and cultural references, McCarthy develops a dialectic of the ritualistic. Rituals appear in her work not as fixed orders but as open constellations that intertwine repetition and deviation, collective symbolism and personal experience, seriousness and subversion. In Rubbermaid, a collage made of glossy black garbage bags, 1-dollar corsets for men and women, scattered mukhwas (an Indian seed-and-herb mixture), metal hooks, and fabric nets, fetish, cultural practice, and “trash” overlap to form a fragile narrative. The work directly refers to the performance project of the same name, which developed in parallel.

In Magpie Island, the tension between value and worthlessness, desire and loss is intensified. The magpie – known for its fascination with shiny things – gathers objects from dollar stores and the street. It embodies a poetics of collecting, where political traces and personal memories intertwine. Similarly, in works such as Butterfly Bush or Tansy (business & finance), materials from everyday contexts combine with gestures of drawing and painting to create fragile pictorial spaces in which social structures and individual experiences mirror each other.

A central aspect of these works lies in their trace-like quality – both physical and symbolic mark making. In McCarthy’s work, the making of a mark becomes an open gesture between body, environment, and time. Historically, connections can be made to artistic positions of the 1960s and 70s – for instance, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, or Ana Mendieta. Hammons’s material aesthetics arise from the inscription of discarded, found, and cheaply available objects, referring to an urban experience within a politically charged context. Hesse’s lines and objects remain deliberately incomplete and porous – signs of a vulnerable yet resistant form – while Mendieta, in her Silueta works, merged her body with landscape and material into temporal but deeply moving traces. In all three cases, transfer and mark making become gestures of resistance against the canonical idea of the finished, autonomous artwork. The ephemeral manifests – as in McCarthy’s practice – as both an aesthetic and political statement.

McCarthy consciously exposes her works to the outside world: to weather, chance, and the urban environment. The tablecloths she paints on act as both foundation and memory – absorbing the conditions under which they were created. She allows space, weather, and everyday traces to permeate her markings. Thus, her practice resists formal self-referentiality – she understands the artistic gesture as a projection surface and physical carrier of social and personal spheres of experience.

Overall, McCarthy’s work is marked by dichotomies: political yet poetic, sensitive yet powerful, vulnerable yet forceful, fragile yet defiant, personal yet public. Between these poles unfolds the “invisible border” that gives the exhibition its title – a border not exhausted in topographical or political clarity but understood as a state of in-between. Borders that one wishes to overcome, and those that must be maintained; the protective space of a garden and the possibility of entering it; between defenselessness and hope, self-empowerment and the continual endangerment of freedom and dignity – McCarthy’s works always respond to our sociopolitical present. It is therefore no contradiction but rather a logical consequence that she organically merges art, music, and politics in her practice – whether through the integration of her music into the artworks (QR code in Magpie Island), or through her performance on 30 November at Odeonsplatz, which also bears the title Invisible Borders and translates the theme of the border from a metaphorical into a political plane. McCarthy will stage a temporary border architecture and situation in the middle of the city, reminiscent of those characteristic of Germany’s external borders since 2015. The performance will be accompanied by dancers and music: art and realpolitik blur. The ephemeral manifests itself.

Monika Bayer-Wermuth

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Opening Thursday, November 20, 6 – 9 pm

Performance at 8 pm!

Anna McCarthy’s performances are an extension of her visual practice. For the opening McCarthy will present Rubbermaid: a flexible performance group that reacts to current travesties, addressing issues of daily life surrounding labour, trash and protest in fluid representations of dance, music and movement. Developed in New York City at the beginning of this year, her collaborator Philip Errico has flown in especially for the night.