This retrospective survey will provide an overview of the Italian-born artist’s career, now nearly twenty years long but still vital and productive. Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures and installations that reveal contradictions at the core of modern-day society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing cultural critique.

This presentation marks the first time that the entirety of Cattelan’s oeuvre will be assembled into a coherent exhibition narrative, with more than 130 works on view, borrowed from private and public collections around the world and ranging from the late 1980s to the present. Long interested in the display of his work as part of his overall conceptual practice, Cattelan has a history of responding to the various contexts in which his art is encountered. His survey exhibition at the Guggenheim will follow suit by providing a platform for him to create a site-specific installation designed to encapsulate his complete production to date. The exhibition will fill the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda in an unorthodox and dramatic installation designed by the artist.

Maurizio Cattelan: All is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The retrospective is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a critical overview of Cattelan’s work by Spector and detailed entries about the works on view.

Photograph of "Stephanie" André Morin, Courtesy: Galerie Perrotin, Paris

SOURCE: The Guggenheim

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