From On the River
Italian artist, born in 1960, best known for his satirical & controversial sculptures.
Frank & Jamie, 2002, wax & clothes, life size figure
Cattelan did not attend art school but taught himself. He worked as a cook, gardener, nurse & mortuary
attendant, before turning to making art with the hope that the art world might offer him ‘better treatment’. he began his creative adventures by making furniture for his apartment - ‘functional furniture with art meaning’. His designs were nothing special, he says, but they sparked
a lot of interest among italian magazine editors & manufacturers. Cattelan felt that designing was not right for him, & an early show in bologna proved to be a turning point. Today he is one of the best-known italian artist to have emerged internationally in the 1990s, & his reputation continues to grow.
Maurizio Cattelan’s art often combines sculpture & performance. Cattelan has a subtle sense of the paradoxes of transgression, the limits of tolerance. Since the early 1990s, his work has provoked & challenged the limits of contemporary value systems through its use of irony & 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 & 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 & fiction, Maurizio Cattelan’s work simulates & subverts the rules of culture & society in a continuous game of detournement, acts of insubordination & symbolical theft. Constantly exploring different materials, contexts & 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 & use the system without being consumed by it.
He has had solo exhibitions in the most important museums worldwide such as the MOMA, New York & the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other recent presentation include Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany & at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He has had the most numerous participations at the Venice Biennale. During his five-time presence at the Biennale he imposed his work as a crucial point of reference in today’s art. Maurizio Cattelan works are part of some of the most important public & private collections worldwide such as:
Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; Fondation Pinault, Paris; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Elaine Dannheisser Collection, New York; Gilles Fuchs Collection, Paris; Seattle Museum of Contemporary Art, Seattle; Migros Museum, Zurich; F.R.A.C., Languedoc Roussillon; Fonds National d’art Contemporain, Puteaux; F.R.A.C., Nord-Pas de Calais; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Turin.
Maurizio Cattelan lives & works in Italy & in the USA.
Interview: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/maurizio-cattelan/
