Maurizio Cattelan (taking a bath with...)

A post-Duchampian artist

Maurizio Cattelan (September 21, 1960, Padova, Italy) is an Italian artist based in New York.

He is known for his satirical sculptures.

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

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.

In 2004 Cattelan exhibited the controversial sculpture Untitled featuring 3 hanging kids for the Nicola Trussardi Foundation.

Maurizio Cattelan along with long-term collaborators Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni, curated the 2006 Berlin Biennale, ran the Wrong Gallery, a glass door in New York attracting many highly accomplished artists to exhibit and published Charley: an occasional slightly satirical arts journal. He frequently submitted articles to international publications such as Flash Art.

Cattelan’s personal art practice has led to him gaining a reputation as an art scene’s joker.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. 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 setted his work above the simple pleasures of well-made visual one-liners.