Current Exhibition

Maurizio Cattelan

SELECTED WORKS BY Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan
-76.000.000

1992

152 x 62 x 63

By re-presenting a safe which has been broken into as a sculptural work of art, Maurizio Cattelan has taken the idea of the ‘Readymade’ one stage further, by cleverly highlighting the criminal nature of this activity as outright theft. '-76.000.000' is a real broken safe from which 76 million lire was stolen. In the broken safe, Maurizio Cattelan has ingeniously discovered a metaphor for the bankruptcy of ideas in post-modern communication, or what Roland Barthes termed “The Death of the Author”. As an artist burdened with the rich history which comes before him, Maurizio Cattelan is constantly needing to break into the historical locker for inspiration.

ARTICLES

Maurizio Cattelan

MAURIZIO CATTELAN
Maurizio Cattelan’s art often combines sculpture and performance. Maurizio Cattelan has a subtle sense of the paradoxes of transgression, the limits of tolerance. Since the early 1990s, his work has provoked and challenged the limits of contemporary value systems through its use of irony and humor. He teases the art world without ever falling into the naive trap of thinking he can subvert a system of which he is part.
The characters and personas inhabiting Maurizio Cattelan’s world are ghostly appearances in a personal theatre of the absurd: policemen flipped upside down, stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling, a swami who buried himself in sand
for hours at a time...suspended between reality and fiction, Maurizio Cattelan’s work simulates and subverts the rules of culture and society in a continuous game of detournement, acts of insubordination and symbolical theft.
Constantly exploring different materials, contexts and strategies, he refuses to take any moral or ideological position, concentrating instead on reproducing reality in all its complexities. While he does not offer solutions, he shows that one can survive and use the system without being consumed by it. Read the entire article here Source: www.designboom.com

Maurizio Cattelan - Biography
Maurizio Cattelan
Jokes and pranks are common in art but what makes Maurizio Cattelan special is that his are funny. Funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. Cattelan is a knowing and sophisticated artist who teases the art world without ever falling into the naive trap of thinking he can subvert a system of which he is part. He specialises not in Dadaist aggression but in slight shifts of reality that are a bit pathetic, a bit embarrassing, a bit silly. In 1994 he persuaded his Paris dealer Emmanuel Perrotin to spend a month dressed as a giant pink phallus. Errotin Le Vrai Lapin was striking precisely because it was so ludicrous: aggressive anti-art gestures and extreme acts have long since been accommodated into commercial art dealing, but to have a dealer make a fool of himself goes some way beyond the call of duty, and of chic.

Born in Padua, Italy, in 1960, Cattelan did not attend art school but taught himself. Cattelan brought his bad taste to New York's Museum of Modern Art when, in 1998, he arranged for an actor in an over-sized cartoon Pablo Picasso mask to meet and greet visitors. Cattelan said he was satirising the postmodern museum and its similarity to a high-cultural Disneyland. He was impressed MoMA put up with such a cruel joke against itself. Read the entire article here Source: www.eyestorm.com

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