Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan’s practice is steered by an irreverent wit and a provocative drive to reexamine cultural figures and institutions, including the art world itself. Employing diverse materials, objects, and gestures in curated exhibitions and publishing projects as well as sculptures, installations, and performances, he deconstructs our ideas of context and value, revealing their often irrational roots. Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy, in 1960, and lives and works in New York and Milan. Early on he adopted an overtly mischievous tone with works such as Errotin, le vrai Lapin (1995), for which he persuaded gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin to wear a giant phallic rabbit costume; Bidibidobidiboo (1996), an installation featuring a taxidermy post-suicide squirrel; and, in 1997 and 1998, respectively, performances in which an assistant walked around SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a papier-mâché Georgia O’Keeffe costume, and through the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in a Pablo Picasso outfit with an oversize head. Cattelan’s first international appearance was at the 45th Biennale di Venezia, at which he leased his space in the exhibition Aperto ’93 to an advertising agency in the action Lavorare è un brutto mestiere ( Working Is a Bad Job ) (1993). In the late 1990s, Cattelan began producing hyperrealistic figurative sculptures, making self-mocking use of his own likeness in works such as La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), in which he appears in the form of a doll clad in a Joseph Beuys–style felt suit and hanging from a coat rack. Cattelan has also courted controversy with such works as La Nona Ora (1999), a wax figure of Pope John Paul II lying under a meteorite; and Him (2001), a diminutive effigy of Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer. In 1997, he presented two thousand stuffed pigeons at the 47th Biennale di Venezia. In 2002, Cattelan cofounded the not-for-profit Wrong Gallery in a vestibule in New York’s Chelsea gallery district with curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, turning over the confined space to a wide variety of experimental projects by more than thirty artists, including Elizabeth Peyton and Lawrence Weiner. (In 2005, after the gallery’s original location closed, it briefly reappeared at Tate Modern, London.) In 2010, Cattelan worked with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to establish Toiletpaper , a biannual visual magazine. Art directed by Micol Talso, each issue revolves around a theme and features a smorgasbord of images, some of which are also mass-produced for sale. In 2011, Cattelan was the subject of All , a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Suspending his works en masse from the ceiling of the museum’s rotunda, he transformed them into a site-specific installation that revealed a unifying preoccupation with the absurdity of life and the finality of death; he also used the occasion of the exhibition’s opening to announce—prematurely—his retirement from art making. Five years later, Cattelan returned to the Guggenheim with America (2016), a functional 18-karat gold replica of one of the museum’s toilets. In 2019, the work was stolen from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, before the opening of the artist’s exhibition Victory Is Not an Option . In December 2019, Cattelan again garnered wide attention with Comedian (2019), a fresh banana duct-taped to the wall at Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2021–22 he presented The Last Judgment , his first major retrospective and first solo exhibition in China, at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.