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Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2009 Polyurethane rubber and steel, 20 × 15 × 7 inches (50.8 × 38.1 × 17.8 cm)© Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2009

Polyurethane rubber and steel, 20 × 15 × 7 inches (50.8 × 38.1 × 17.8 cm)
© Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001 Polyester, wax, and clothing, 39 ¾ × 16 ⅛ × 20 ⅞ inches (101 × 41 × 53 cm)© Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001

Polyester, wax, and clothing, 39 ¾ × 16 ⅛ × 20 ⅞ inches (101 × 41 × 53 cm)
© Maurizio Cattelan

About

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.

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Museum Exhibitions

Taryn Simon, Chapter XI, from the series A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, 2008–11 © Taryn Simon

On View

Taryn Simon in
Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother

Through September 15, 2024
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in albums or pictures in archives as sources of inspiration. Taking its title from a photograph by Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother brings together works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from the 1970s to today. The selected works reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality evoked by these physical artifacts, while underlining the power of the found object. Work by Taryn Simon is included.

Taryn Simon, Chapter XI, from the series A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, 2008–11 © Taryn Simon