Paul McCarthy in Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today
17 April—2 Aug 2026
Group exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
What does it mean to be a man today? This question has become increasingly urgent with the rise of the ‘manosphere’, a loose network of online spaces where a brash, misogynistic masculinity is asserted that, to many, feels threatening. Fueled by the spread of Trumpism, this brand of masculinity has become increasingly mainstream. The artworks in Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today explore masculinity as an agent and performance of power – but also as a lived reality that can be conflicting, banal, unsteady, and tender. They approach masculinity as a broad and layered phenomenon, beyond dominant clichés.
The exhibition brings together an intergenerational group of 35 artists. Works made between the 1960s to the 1990s by artists including Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Tetsumi Kudo, Melle, Hans Eijkelboom, Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley, Julio Galán, Pope.L, Sophie Calle, and Sylvie Fleury place masculinity within the broader contexts of modernity, postwar consumerism, industrialization, and psychoanalysis.
More recent and new works by artists such as Arlette, EMIRHAKIN, Hamishi Farah, Solomon Garçon, Sven Gex, Jasmine Gregory, Zhana Ivanova, Basir Mahmood, Reba Maybury, Marlie Mul, Sands Murray-Wassink, Paul Pfeiffer, Sara Sadik, P. Staff, Diamond Stingily, SoiL Thornton, Salman Toor, Amanda van Hesteren, Alex Vivian, Bruno Zhu, and Selina Zürrer. They approach masculinity from the perspectives of intimacy, queerness, labor, race, class, fetishization, vulnerability, and popular culture . Across these works, masculinity appears not as a stable or unified identity but as a contested field of representations, gestures, desires, and contradictions. Dominance and aggression coexist with fragility and banality; control with exposure; fantasy with failure.