Displaying items by tag: Maurizio Cattelan

The Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, France, is currently hosting the exhibition “ArtLovers: Stories of Art in the Pinault Collection.” The show features forty works from François Pinault’s illustrious collection, including more than a third that have never been displayed in previous exhibitions of the Collection. Thirty-three artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Rachel Whiteread will be represented.

The Pinault Collection, which features paintings, sculptures, installations, video, drawings, and more, was assembled by the French businessman François Pinault. Pinault is the founder of the holding company Artemis S.A., which owns Christie’s auction house as well as a number of luxury brands. Pinault currently owns one of the biggest collections of contemporary art worldwide and in 2006, he acquired Venice’s Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana to display his collection. The exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum was curated by Martin Bethenod, the Director of the Palazzo Grassi.

The artist Maurizio Cattelan, like Andy Warhol before him, has always loved a good doppelgänger, someone to send in his stead for lectures and appearances while he finds something more interesting to do. For several years, in a stunt that became something of an artwork in its own right, the curator Massimiliano Gioni presented himself at public events as Mr. Cattelan, thoroughly confusing everybody.

At a Chinese restaurant in Chelsea the other day a reporter showed up to an interview with Mr. Cattelan to find, even more disconcertingly, that a doppelgänger for the reporter was already there, a middle-age man perusing the menu and chatting up his subject. Mr. Cattelan described it as an honest mistake: Waiting outside the restaurant, he ran into the man, Danny, who had a business appointment there. Danny mistook Mr. Cattelan for his contact, and the artist mistook Danny for the reporter. (“Danny, Randy, sounds the same to me,” Mr. Cattelan said. “I’m Italian.”) He invited Danny to stay anyway; Danny, oddly, accepted, and the interview proceeded with all three men at the table over a platter of chicken and hot peppers, Mr. Cattelan grinning and winking like Groucho Marx.

Keeping this scene in mind, it will probably come as no surprise that Mr. Cattelan — whose wildly inventive and irreverent career is approaching the quarter-century mark — has long viewed the idea of a conventional museum retrospective of his work with something akin to horror.

For an artist whose best-known pieces have included eerily lifelike sculptures of Pope John Paul II felled by a large (errant or perhaps divinely directed) meteorite, of Hitler as a boyish supplicant, of a post-suicide squirrel with its tiny head down on a tiny kitchen table, and of a shoeless, oddly poignant John F. Kennedy lying in a coffin, a standard chronological survey would, he was certain, disarm the pieces and neutralize their wickedly effective humor. It would be like watching Lenny Bruce try to do stand-up during a church service.

So when Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and a longtime champion of Mr. Cattelan’s, kept broaching the subject of a retrospective, “it put me in so much despair, truly,” he said. He ducked her and changed the subject when she persisted. And then he had an idea, one he intended partly as a way to keep putting her off: take all his works and dangle them from ropes in the middle of the Guggenheim’s elegantly winding rotunda, like so many fat salamis in a butcher’s window. Art world expectations and curatorial hierarchies be damned! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright!

Perhaps as punishment for such a proposal, Ms. Spector told him that she wanted to try it. (“Can you believe it?” he stage-whispered.) And so it happens that beginning on Nov. 4 the Guggenheim will mount one of the strangest, most audacious exhibitions in its half-century history, suspending several thousand pounds’ — and many tens of millions of dollars’ — worth of high-end, internationally collected art from cables attached to a heavy-duty aluminum truss installed almost 90 feet in the air under the museum’s glass dome.

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.