Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960, Padua, Italy) is an Italian conceptual artist known for his subversive displays. Despite causing much controversy with his satiric critique of the art world and of society, Cattelan has deftly managed to enthrall rather than enrage his audience and his peers.

Early career

In Untitled (1991), which is a police report recording Cattelan’s false claim that his art had been stolen, his birth date is identified as September 21, 1960, an assertion repeated in his Eternity (2018) and in Francesco Bonami’s Maurizio Cattelan: autobiografia non autorizzata (2011; “Maurizio Cattelan: Unauthorized Autobiography”). Before turning to sculpture and conceptual art in the early 1990s, Cattelan worked a number of jobs, including designing furniture. A self-taught artist, Cattelan quickly garnered a reputation for a sense of humor and a penchant for blurring the distinction between art and reality. He described himself as a “lazy” artist and told The Guardian newspaper that “I don’t do anything.” Some of his actions backed up the latter claim. In 1992, for example, he assembled a group of donors to award him a $10,000 grant that stipulated that he not exhibit any artwork for one year. At the 1993 Venice Biennale, he made a statement (and a profit) by subletting his exhibit space to a perfume company. At an exhibition in Turin, Italy, he knotted bedsheets together and hung them out a window, giving the impression that he had left the building.

In truth, however, Cattelan did plenty of creating. In 1999 he exhibited La nona ora, which depicted Pope John Paul II having just been struck by a meteorite. That same year, at a London gallery, he displayed a miniature replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, located in Washington, D.C., that had engraved on it the score of every football (soccer) match lost by the English national team. His commemoration of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Frankie and Jamie (2002), showed two wax figures of New York police officers standing upside down.

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Guggenheim retrospective

Cattelan’s 2011 retrospective at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where the artist suspended his work from the center of the building’s iconic rotunda, opened to mixed reviews but nonetheless confirmed his place in the contemporary art world—as did the fact that his work often commanded millions at auction. Some, however, still questioned whether Cattelan was a legitimate artist or just a con man, and that issue pervades the documentary Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back (2016).

America

Despite his work’s potential to annoy, Cattelan deftly managed—for the most part—to delight his audience. Indeed, his America sculpture, a functioning solid-gold toilet, which was installed in a restroom at the Guggenheim from 2016 to 2017, drew long lines from good-humored visitors and caused a social media frenzy. The artwork, estimated to be worth more than $4 million, was later stolen from a restroom at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, while on exhibition in 2019.

Comedian

In 2019 Cattelan’s conceptual piece Comedian caused a sensation when it was displayed at the 2019 Art Basel Miami, an annual international art fair. Simply consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall, the work was sold in an edition of three for $120,000 for the first two and $150,000 for the final. The seeming incongruity between the ephemeral object and the high price it commanded prompted age-old conversations about what makes something art. The work, however, appeared to critique how art is made in the 21st century. Comedian recalls Marcel Duchamp’s revolutionary Fountain, wherein a mass-produced object (in that case a urinal) became art through conceptual means: the artist’s declaration that the urinal was art, the work’s acceptance into the 1917 Independents Exhibition in New York City, and its placement on a pedestal in a gallery. Comedian, on the other hand, became art in a 21st-century way: through hype on social media and by selling at a fashionable art fair. The critique appeared to be complete in 2020 when the Guggenheim in New York City confirmed the work’s artistic merit by accepting an edition of Comedian into its collection (another edition sold at auction in 2024 for $5.2 million without fees). In 2021 the work was the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by American artist Joe Morford, who claimed to have created a similar artwork, Banana & Orange, nearly two decades earlier. A judge in 2023 determined there was not enough evidence to support the allegation.

Later work

Cattelan faced similar accusations of plagiarism for Sunday (2024), his work comprising a series of 24-karat gold-plated panels riddled with dents and holes from gunfire. He received a letter from the lawyer of British American artist Anthony James, alleging that Cattelan’s piece is very similar to the stainless steel panels dented by gunfire that James had been making for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the Vatican had announced earlier that year that it had made the unusual decision of commissioning Cattelan to create a piece for its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The result was Father, a mural on the side of a women’s prison depicting a pair of dirty and injured feet, recalling those of Christ’s in Andrea Mantegna’s painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483).

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