When an artist has developed a strong visual imagery and has touched viewers, colleagues and critics for 40 years, then there is a chance that the public thinks it knows the artist.
However, the exhibition of inflatable sculptures revealed that, remarkably, the American artist Paul McCarthy still cannot be entirely understood. The specific nature of the Middelheim Museum as an open-air museum offered the opportunity to display, for the very first time, a world premiere, an entire series of the large inflatable sculptures that McCarthy has created during his career.