Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan
HIM, depicting Hitler kneeling in prayer in a courtyard in the former Warsaw Ghetto
Born	(1960-09-21) September 21, 1960 --> Padova, Italy

Maurizio Cattelan (September 21, 1960, Padova, Italy) is an Italian artist. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite.

Early life

Cattelan started his career in Forlì (Italy) making wooden furniture in the 1980s where he came to know some designers like Ettore Sottsass.

He made a catalogue of his work which he sent to galleries. This promotion gave him an opening in design and contemporary art. He created a sculpture of an ostrich with its head buried in the ground, wore a costume of a figurine with a giant head of Picasso, and affixed a Milanese gallerist to a wall with tape. During this period, he also created the Oblomov Foundation.

Artistic style

Cattelan’s personal art practice has led to him gaining a reputation as an art scene’s joker.^[1] In 1995 he began his line of taxidermied horses, donkeys, mice and dogs; in 1999 he started making life-size wax effigies of various people, including himself.^[2] One of his best known sculptures, ‘La Nona Ora’ consists of an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial dress being crushed by a meteor and is a good example of his typically humorous approach to work. Another of Cattelan’s quirks is his use of a ‘stand-in’ in media interviews equipped with a stock of evasive answers and non-sensical explanations.

Between 2005 and 2010 his work has largely centered on publishing and curating. Earlier projects in these fields have included the founding of “The Wrong Gallery”, a store window in New York City , in 2002 and its subsequent display within the collection of the Tate Modern from 2005 to 2007; collaborations on the publications Permanent Food, 1996–2007- with Dominique Gonzalez Foerster and Paola Manfrin- and the slightly satirical arts journal "Charley", 2002–present (the former an occasional journal comprising a pastiche of pages torn from other magazines, the latter a series on contemporary artists); and the curating of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999.^[3] Along with long-term collaborators Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni, Cattelan also curated the 2006 Berlin Biennale. He frequently submitted articles to international publications such as Flash Art .

Cattelan’s art makes fun of various systems of order – be it social niceties or his regular digs at the art world – and he often utilises themes and motifs from art of the past and other cultural sectors in order to get his point across. Cattelan saw no reason why contemporary art should be excluded from the critical spotlight it shines on other areas of life and his work seeks to highlight the incongruous nature of the world and our interventions within it no matter where they may lie. 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 dark humour sets his work above the simple pleasures of well-made visual one-liners.^[4]

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".^[5]

Selected works

• One of his most discussed art work is "ghost track": in December 2009 for his solo show in Milan there was a "strange" similarity between the puppets representation of himself and Massimo Tartaglia (Silvio Berlusconi attacker in December 2009). The media effect and many similarities with La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) suggest that "ghost track" is truly a ghost art work of Maurizio Cattelan.^[6]
• One of his most famous artworks is a sculpture of Pope John Paul II hit by a meteorite, titled La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), made in 1999. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London as part of the prestigious Apocalypse show, and was sold at Christie's for $886,000.^[7]
• Working Is a Bad Job (1993): At the 1993 Venice Biennale he leased his allotted space to an advertising agency, which installed a billboard promoting a new perfume.^[8]
• Another Fucking Readymade (1996): For an exhibition at the de Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam, he stole the entire contents of another artist’s show from a nearby gallery with the idea of passing it off as his own work, until the police insisted he return the loot on threat of arrest.^[8]
• HIM (2001): a sculpture resembling a schoolboy kneeling in prayer, except that the head has been replaced with the realistic likeness of Adolf Hitler. The sculpture was frequently displayed at the end of a long hallway or at the opposite end of a white room, turned away from the viewer so that they wouldn't be able to recognize the individual until they advanced close enough.
• For Errotin, le vrai Lapin (1995), he persuaded his gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin to wear a giant pink rabbit costume shaped like a phallus to Cattelan's gallery opening^[9]
• Turisti (Tourists) (1997), taxidermied pigeons and fake pigeon feces exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1997^[10]
• In 1997, at the Consortium in Dijon, Cattelan dug a coffin-shaped hole in the floor of the museum's main gallery to acknowledge his own frailty in the face of having to mount a museum show.^[11]
• Untitled, 2001 (2001), installation created for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that depicts the artist peering mischievously from a hole in the floor at a gallery of 17th-century Dutch masters.^[8]
• As part of the 2001 Venice Biennale, he erected a full sized HOLLYWOOD sign over the largest rubbish tip on Palermo, Sicily.
• L.O.V.E (2011), a 36-foot white marble sculpture middle finger sticking straight up from an otherwise fingerless hand, pointing away from Borsa Italiana in Milan.^[12]
• Turisti, his new work for the 2011 Venice Biennale made up of 2,000 embalmed pigeons.
• "Britney" (2010) sculpture of his wife nude

Magazine projects

From 1996 to 2007, together with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Paola Manfrin, Cattelan published 15 issues of Permanent Food: a magazine built by pages torn from other magazines. 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 Toilet Paper , a bi-annual, picture-based publication.^[13] As part of a public art series at the High Line in 2012, Toilet Paper 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.^[14]

On opening night of the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum of New York, a Hummer stretch limo with the words “TOILET PAPER” printed on the side was not-so-discreetly parked outside the museum. The images in the magazine might appear to have been appropriated from world’s most surreal stock-photograph service, but they’re all made from scratch. “Every issue starts with a theme, always something basic and general, like love or greed,” Cattelan has explained. “Then, as we start, we move like a painter on a canvas, layering and building up the issue. We always find ourselves in a place we didn’t expect to be. The best images are the result of improvisation.” Many images are rejected, he said, because they’re “not Toilet Paper enough.” What makes a Toilet Paper photo? “We keep homing in on what a Toilet Paper image is. Like distilling a perfume. It’s not about one particular style or time frame; what makes them Toilet Paper is a special twist. An uncanny ambiguity.”

Exhibitions

Cattelan's work has been on view in numerous solo exhibitions, at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Artpace, San Antonio, Texas; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Project 65 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as at Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Le Consortium, Dijon; and Wiener Secession, Vienna. A major retrospective, assembling 130 objects of Cattelan's career since 1989, opened in 2011 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Cattelan has also exhibited at Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), the Tate Gallery, London (1999), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2003) and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2003), and participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997, 1999, and 2002), Manifesta 2 (1998), Luxembourg, Melbourne International Biennial 1999, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York.^[15] In 2004, Cattelan exhibited the controversial sculpture Untitled featuring 3 hanging kids for the Nicola Trussardi Foundation. In 2012, he participated in the group show Lifelike originating at the Walker Art Center.^[16]

Prizes

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, and was also awarded the Arnold-Bode prize from the Kunstverein Kassel, Germany, that same year.^[15] A career prize (a gold medal) was awarded to Maurizio Cattelan by the 15th Rome Quadriennale.^[17] On 24 March 2009, at the MAXXI Museum of Rome,^[18] the singer Elio^[19] of the Elio e le Storie Tese, who announced that he was the real Cattelan, came to receive the prize.^[20]

Art market

In 2004, one of Cattelan's best-known older pieces, a suspended, taxidermised horse titled The Ballad of Trotsky, was sold to Bernard Arnault in New York for $2.1m (£1.15m).^[21] Par Peur de l'Amour, a sculpture of an elephant hiding under a bedsheet that simultaneously conjures a child on Halloween and a Ku Klux Klan uniform, sold at Christie's in 2004 for $2.7 million.

Cattelan is represented by Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, Massimo de Carlo in Milan and Marian Goodman Gallery in New York .

Television

Appeared on 60 Minutes.

Bibliography

• Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann, 6th Caribbean Biennal, Dijon, Les presses du réel, 2001, ISBN 978-2-84066-050-7
• Francesco Bonami, Nancy Spector, Barbara Vanderlinden and Massimiliano Gioni, Maurizio Cattelan, London, Phaidon Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7148-4306-3
• Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, Of Mice and Men, Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2006, ISBN 978-3-7757-1765-6
• Giorgio Verzotti, Maurizio Cattelan, Milan, Charta, 2009, ISBN 978-88-8158-267-9
• Franklin Sirmans, Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life After Death?, Yale University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-300-14688-2
• Nancy Spector, Maurizio Cattelan: All, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 2011, ISBN 978-0-89207-416-7

References

External links

• Maurizio Cattelan at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
• Maurizio Cattelan at Marian Goodman Gallery
• Maurizio Cattelan at Galleria Massimo de Carlo
• Maurizio Cattelan at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
• Toilet Paper Official website
• La Nona Ora
• Review & discussion on the Maurizio Cattelan exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London by Kostas Prapoglou on REVma -/+, November 2012
• Jarrett Earnest in conversation with Maurizio Cattelan, Brooklyn Rail, 2011
• Michele Robecchi interview with Maurizio Cattelan, Interview, June-July 2009
• Ben Lewis, feature about Maurizio Cattelan, March 2007 (Video)
• Sophie Arie interview with Maurizio Cattelan, Guardian, 23 June 2004