The Italian artist and prankster Maurizio Cattelan has announced his intention to stop making the hyperrealist sculptures for which he is known. "I have come to the end of a cycle of my art," he told The Art Newspaper at a reception in Venice on the eve of the biennale preview opening. "I have to get out of a system which seduces you into repeating yourself," he said, adding that his upcoming Guggenheim retrospective in New York, which opens in November, had provided him with a good opportunity to look back on his career.

"After New York, I'm finished with the sculptures. I can reinvent myself as a new artist, perhaps as a photographer," added Cattelan who has recently launched a photography magazine called Toilet Paper. "Art is like therapy. If it works, you don't have to see a therapist. You have to ensure it keeps working," he said.

If what Cattelan says is true, then the current biennale may be one of the last opportunities to see newly-commissioned work by the artist. For Bice Curiger's biennale exhibition, Cattelan has expanded an installation, entitled The Tourists, which he first made for the Venice Biennale in 1997. It consists of a giant flock of two thousand pigeons which peer menacingly down on visitors to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini from beams, pipes and rafters in every hall of the building.