Maurizio Cattelan Takes the Piss Out of the Art World

The artist Maurizio Cattelan loves to engage in, and he primarily enjoys enjoying God. There was his smiting of Pope John Paul II in the hyperrealistic 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora in which a meteorite crushes His Holiness. (Miracle of miracles: This did not avoid the Vatican from asking Cattelan to entrance its pavilion at the Venice Biennale this 12 months.) There was his resurrection of Hitler in 2001 with his child-sizing, praying sculpture of the Führer, Him. And then there was Cattelan’s personal resurrection in 2016, when he ended a quite temporary retirement by putting in a strong gold toilet at the Guggenheim and calling it The united states. A person issue he hasn’t been eager to resurrect is his relationship with industrial galleries. Until eventually this spring: The 63-year-outdated Italian artist is again in Chelsea with Sunday, his initial solo gallery exhibition in more than two a long time and his to start with with Gagosian.

He has revealed with museums and art fairs throughout this time. (He’s even produced operate for New York.) So why not galleries? “Sometimes with galleries you have significantly less manage. They are screening me we are screening each individual other,” Cattelan explained to me. He glanced at the Gagosian reps who eyed him warily. “No? I should not say this on the document?” “It’s unquestionably as well late,” claimed the gallery manager with a sigh. The set up has been challenging: A person of the show’s two works is Sunday (2024), comprising unique 24-karat-plated panels that a crew of professionals shot by with bullets, riddling them with dents and holes. The panels experienced to be mounted in a very long, horizontal procession alongside the gallery’s back again wall. When I questioned Cattelan if he’d at any time utilised weapons in his do the job ahead of, he smiled and reported, “I did rob a pair of banking companies.” (He’s about to do so all over again: Conveniently for the gallery, each and every of Sunday’s panels can be marketed separately.) In the center of the ground lies the marble sculpture November (2024), a barefoot, indigent person reclining on a bench and shielding his face with just one hand even though he holds his dribbling penis with the other. They are contacting it a fountain, but there is no drainage. Correct now, the strategy is to let the h2o piss proper on to the floor.

Picture: Christopher Payne

America was a comment on the availability of art-world bullshit. Sunday is a remark on the availability of guns. November, nonetheless, is one more a person of his resurrections. Though Cattelan has been making sculptures of homeless figures for many years — he suggests he sees them as a way to force oblivious artwork viewers to fork out notice to the “invisible” persons of culture — he modeled this 1 right after his longtime pal and business enterprise partner Lucio Zotti, who died in September. He admitted that his mate (who was not homeless) hadn’t needed to be proven in his work. He is familiar with Zotti would not have been delighted. “But not due to the fact of the peeing,” stated Cattelan. “I’m absolutely sure he would’ve appreciated that.”