Maurizio Cattelan

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.