Maurizio Cattelan was born on 1960 in Padua, Italy. 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.
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.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1999
? Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
1998
? Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA), Milwaukee, Wisconsin ? Project #65, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
1997
? Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy ? Le Consortium, Dijon, France ? Wiener Secession, Vienna, Austria ? Espace Jules Verne, Centre d'Art de Bretigny-sur-Orge, France
? Photomontage, Le Consortium, Dijon, France ? Kwangju Biennial, Kwangju, Korea ? Caravanserraglio, Ex Aurum, Pescara, Italy ? Le Labyrinthe Moral, Le Consortium, Dijon, France ? La Collezione, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy
1994
? Soggetto Soggetto, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy ? Prima Linea, Flash Art Museum, Trevi, Italy ? L'hiver de l'amour, ARC/Mus'e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; P.S.1/Institute for Art and Urban ? Resources, Long Island City, New York
1993
? H'tel Carlton Palace, Chambre 763, Paris, France ? Documentario, Spazio Opos, Milan, Italy ? Nachtshattengew?chse, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany ? Aperto 93, Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy
1992
? Ottovolante, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy ? Una Domenica a Rivara, Castello di Rivara, Rivara, Italy
1991
? Loro, Castello Visconteo, Trezzo, Italy ? Anni 90, Galleria d'Arte Moderna , Bologna, Italy ? Operazione S.Giustino, Milan, Italy ? Siamo qui e stiamo facendo, Communie di Castellafiume, Italy
1990
? Existenz Maximum, Instituto degli innocenti, Florence, Italy ? Improvvisazione libera, Museo Pecci, Prato, Italy ? Ipotesi d'arte giovane, Faqbbrica del vapore, Milan, Italy
Conclusions:
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.
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