Santa has been an essential part of McCarthy’s assembly of characters for more than 40 years and has evolved through various media. Amongst several variations of the Santa sculpture, a large version was commissioned for Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2001. It was quickly nicknamed Butt Plug Gnome by the public. Due to the controversy it caused, it was moved around in Rotterdam until it got its final placement in the Eendrachtsplein Square in 2008. Santa in Ekebergparken is a further development of the figure and is finished in a characteristic red colour, which was McCarthy’s original vision for the sculpture.

The recurring element in McCarthy’s artistic work is the use of humorous, absurd, and often disturbing placements of known cultural icons or phenomena, aiming criticism at structural issues in society. His work confronts, criticises, and mocks American culture, the consumer society and the commercialisation of iconic characters. By playing with cultural myths and popular illusions, fantasy and reality collide in an insane and often very challenging exploration of our subconscious. Well-known Disney characters like Snow White and Pinocchio are in McCarthy’s art stripped of their naïve, pure and innocent characteristics and instead given disturbing, sexualised, and violent attributes. These appearances do not match our usual concept of them and the innocence they represent makes this even more problematic. McCarthy refers to the human urges that we sometimes prefer not to acknowledge and forces them to the surface.