Maurizio Cattelan


Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist. Known primarily for his hyperrealistic sculptures and installations, Cattelan's practice also includes curating and publishing. His satirical approach to art has resulted in him being frequently labelled as a joker or prankster of the art world. Self-taught as an artist, Cattelan has exhibited internationally in museums and Biennials. In 2011 the Guggenheim Museum, New York presented a retrospective of his work. Some of Cattelan's better-known works include America, consisting of a solid gold toilet; La Nona Ora, a sculpture depicting a fallen Pope who has been hit by a meteorite; and Comedian, a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall.

Early life and education

Cattelan was born on 21 September 1960 in Padua, Italy. He was raised there by his mother, a cleaning lady, and his father, a truck driver. He started his career in the early 1980s by designing and producing making wooden furniture in Forlì. Cattelan has no formal training in art. He has said that in addition to reading art catalogues, "making shows has been my school".

Art practice

Humour and satire are at the core of Cattelan's work; this approach has often seen him labelled variously as an art scene joker, jester or prankster. He has been described by Jonathan P. Binstock, curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art "as one of the great post-Duchampian artists and a smartass, too". Discussing the topic of originality with ethnographer, Sarah Thornton, Cattelan explained, "Originality doesn't exist by itself. It is an evolution of what is produced.... Originality is about your capacity to add." His work was often based on simple puns or subverts clichéd situations by, for example, substituting animals for people in sculptural tableaux. "Frequently morbidly fascinating, Cattelan's humour sets his work above the visual pleasure one-liners," wrote Carol Vogel of the New York Times.
Cattelan's first artwork has been noted as a photo art piece in 1989 entitled Lessico Familiare, a framed self-portrait in which he is depicted forming a Hand Heart over his naked chest.
Cattelan is commonly noted for his use of taxidermy during the mid-1990s. Novecento consists of the taxidermied body of a former racehorse named Tiramisu, which hangs by a harness in an elongated, drooping posture. Another work utilizing taxidermy is Bidibidobidiboo, a miniature depiction of a squirrel slumped over its kitchen table, a handgun at its feet.
In 1999 he started making life-size wax effigies of various subjects, including himself. One of his best known sculptures, La Nona Ora, consists of an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial costume being crushed by a meteor.

Curating

In 1999, he curated with Jens Hoffmann on the Caribbean Biennial.
In 2002 he co-founded "The Wrong Gallery", a glass door leading to a 2.5 square foot exhibition space at 516A½ West 20th street in New York City. After the building housing the gallery was sold, the door and gallery was put on display within the collection of the Tate Modern until 2009.
With long-term collaborators Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni, Cattelan also curated the 2006 Berlin Biennale. Articles by Cattelan frequently appear in international publications such as Flash Art.

Publishing

From 1996–2007 Cattelan collaborated with Dominique Gonzalez-Foster and Paola Manfrin on the publication Permanent Food, an occasional journal consisting of a pastiche of pages torn from other magazines and submissions by artists of similar material. From 2002 he collaborated on the satirical arts journal Charley, a series on contemporary artists.
In 2009, Cattelan teamed up with Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to create an editorial for W magazine's Art Issue.
In 2010, they founded the magazine Toiletpaper, a bi-annual, picture-based publication. As part of a public art series at the High Line in 2012, Toiletpaper was commissioned with a billboard at the corner of 10th Avenue and West 18th Street in New York, showing an image of a woman's manicured and jeweled fingers, detached from their hands, emerging from a vibrant blue velvet background. In 2014, Cattelan and Ferrari produced a fashion spread for the Spring Fashion issue of New York.
In the project entitled 1968, A Toiletpaper collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari and the Deste Foundation in Athens, Cattelan celebrates the works and time of Dakis Joannou and his collection of radical design.
Toilet Paper differs from the two previously magazine projects, as its photographs were planned and designated solely for the magazine. The level of originality for this magazine surpassed the others, providing the audience vague, oddly familiar photographs to peruse through. Toilet Paper is a surrealist pantomime of images that the viewer cannot easily trace back to a starting point, while they've most likely been conjured by popular culture. It is a whirlwind of loud colors mixed in with the occasional black-and-white photo: "the pictures probe the unconscious, tapping into sublimated perversions and spasms of violence."

Selected works

Solo exhibitions

A major retrospective titled All, assembling 130 objects of Cattelan's career since 1989, opened in 2011 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. On the occasion of the exhibition, Cattelan announced his early retirement.
In 2016 the Monnaie de Paris his retrospective of his work titled Not Afraid of Love.

Biennales

Cattelan has participated in the Venice Biennale, Manifesta 2, Luxembourg, Melbourne International Biennial 1999, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York.

Recognition

Cattelan was a finalist for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize in 2000, received an honorary degree in Sociology from the University of Trento, Italy. In 2004, he was awarded the Arnold Bode prize from the Kunstverein Kassel, Germany. A career prize was awarded to Maurizio Cattelan by the 15th Rome Quadriennale. On 24 March 2009, at the MAXXI Museum of Rome, came to receive the prize, claiming to be the real Cattelan.

Television

On the occasion of his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Cattelan was profiled on the American television program 60 Minutes. In 2016 a documentary about his life and work, The Art World's Prankster: Maurizio Cattelan, aired on BBC.

Controversies

Cattelan was represented hanged with a noose around his neck in 2010 in the Vatican by the Sicilian artist Giuseppe Veneziano.
In 2017, when the Trump administration White House requested the loan of a Vincent Van Gogh painting, from the Guggenheim collection, Landscape With Snow, the museum's chief curator Nancy Spector suggested instead Cattelan's work America, a sculpture of a gold toilet.
On December 7, 2019, Comedian, an artwork created by Cattelan in an edition of three for the 2019 installment of Art Basel Miami Beach consisting of a banana held to a wall by duct tape, sold to an unnamed French art collector for $120,000 US. The fruit in the work was later summarily eaten by Georgian performance artist David Datuna, who called his piece Hungry Artist. Meanwhile Galerie Perrotin, which is exhibiting the piece, replaced the fruit and stated that it is an "idea", while Datuna said "it was very delicious". Emmanuel Perrotin was mostly just unimpressed by the lack of originality of the move, stating 'this kind of provocation is not new. If you remember, Duchamp's Fountain was famously pissed in almost a dozen times. If anything, it's quite mundane.'