Maurizio Cattelan

London

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is known as the art world’s agent provocateur, using what seem to be stunts to address universal themes around the nature of dogma, power and death. The solo exhibition, Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: Maurizio Cattelan, includes one of his earliest works – a miniature family kitchen featuring a squirrel that has committed suicide. ‚Bidibidobidiboo‘ (1996), after the fairy godmother’s song in Disney’s Cinderella, encapsulates Cattelan’s acerbic wit and his melancholic worldview.

Elsewhere a heavy duty carrier bag filled to bursting point contains rubble from Milan’s Contemporary Art Pavilion destroyed by a Mafia-related bomb attack. In another sculpture the emblem of the 1970s terrorist group Brigate Rosse is turned into a neon Christmas greeting. A wax effigy of Cattelan himself, dressed in the iconic artist Joseph Beuys’ signature grey felt suit and hanging by the neck from a clothes rack, satirizes the role of the artist as saviour. He comments ‘maybe I’m just saying that we are all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it’. Cattelan’s work is part of a return of the figure in contemporary art. By contrast with classical statuary however, the body today may be surreal, performative, mythic or abject.

Whitechapel Gallery

September 25th – December 2nd, 2012
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX
UK

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