This comprehensive monograph documents the work of Maurizio Cattelan, the best-known Italian artist to have emerged internationally in the 1990s. His work has featured in three editions of the Venice Biennale (1993; 1997; 1999) and in major venues worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); and the Tate Gallery, London (1999). Cattelan creates sculptures that mock the art system and even the artist himself, with considerable wit and audacity. Poking fun at art history (with, for example, a giant, Disneyland-type figure of Pablo Picasso greeting visitors at New York's Museum of Modern Art), monumentality (with a tomb-like marble epitaph listing all the football matches lost by the England team, exhibited in a prominent London gallery), his native Italy (in a major exhibition celebrating new Italian art, Cattelan created a rug forming a map of his country - inevitably trampled and soiled beneath museum visitors' feet), and often makes fun of himself and his own inability to be a responsible, "serious" artist. Part jester, part accuser of the contemporary art world, part thief, Cattelan also conveys a lonely desperation behind the humour and sarcasm in his unconventional works.

Table of Contents

Interview - Cattelan's 'slippery' personality shines through while critic and Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector offers solid interpretative responses to the subversive strategies behind Cattelan's work. Survey - International curator Francesco Bonami sets the work in the context of recent Italian political and social history. His work-by-work analysis is divided into the main themes in Cattelan's work (autobiography, the allegorical use of animals, politics, and so forth) to draw together coherently Cattelan's varied body of work. Focus - Curator Barbara Vanderlindern offers a first hand response to the work Cattelan made for Manifesta 2, 1998, co-curated by Vanderlinden): an untitled work consisting of a living uprooted tree, growing in a block of dirt inside the exhibition space itself. Artist's Choice - The two selections combine issues dear to the artist's heart: adolescence, sex and death. In Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, the teenage Alexander Portnoy describes his new-found obsession with masturbation; and suicide letters are chosen from... Or Not To Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (ed. Marc Etkind, 1997). (True to the artist's characteristic avoidance of responsibility, Cattelan has asked an anonymous editorial assistant to select one of his Artist's Choices on his behalf.) Artist's Writings - Previous interviews are included from the artist's early years - including an interview notoriously 'stolen' from another artist - and a recent discussion with the curator of his 2003 'retrispective' at Los Angeles MoCA, Massimilano Gioni Update - Maurizio Ccatelan's closest collaborator and spokesperson, Massimiliano Gioni, offers an especially insightful look at this enigmatic, uncompromising artist, examining the artist's uncanny, often dangerous will to provoke his audience. Recent examples include The Elerventh Hour, a realistic sculpture of the Pop being hit by a meteorite, or a wax scultpure of miniaturized Adolf Hitler. Chronology and Bibliography

About the Author

Maurizio Cattelan is Italy's best-known young artist, an artist with a strong international audience. His galleries are: Anthony d'Offay, London, Dering Street, London W1, (0171) 499-4100; Marian Goodman, 24 W 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, tel. (212) 977-7160, fax 581 5187; and Emmanuel Perrotin, 30 rue Louise Weiss, 75013 Paris, tel. 1 4216.7979, fax 4216.7974. Francesco Bonami (Survey) is Artistic Director of the 2003 Venice Biennale. Formerly Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, his many previous curatorial roles have included Manifesta 3 (Ljubliana, 2000). American Editor of Flash Art from 1990 to 1997, Bonami has followed Cattelan's work for many years, and wrote on the artist in cream, Phaidon Press, 1998. Nancy Spector (Interview) is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her exhibitions there have included Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1995), Robert Rauschenberg: Performance (1997) and Andreas Slominski (1999). Spector is a regular contributor to Artforum, Parkett and frieze magazines, and is one of the 10 contributing curators to cream 3 (Phaidon, 2003). Barbara Vanderlinden (Focus) is an independent curator who founded and directs the independent exhibition space Roomade in Brusssels. In 1998 she was co-curator (with Maria Lind and Robert Fleck) of Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg), the international exhibition which included, among others, a new work by Maurizio Cattelan. For his Artist's Choice Cattelan has chosen two texts: an extract from Portnoy's Complaint (1969), on the angst and sexual anguish of growing up, by American novelist Philip Roth, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and some excerpts from... Or Not To Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (ed. Marc Etkind, 1997) an anthology of real suicide messages from the anonymous and the world famous. Massimiliano Gioni (Update) heads the American US desk of Flash Art International and is a noted independent critic and curator, recently nominated as curator for the Italian Pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale. Gioni is also Maurizio Cattelan's closest collaborator, often acting as the artist's spokesman and even standing in for the artist as his alter-ego. Author's Residence: Francesco Bonami: Chicago; Nancy Spector: New York; Barbara Vanderlinden: Brussels