With his show All, presented at Guggenheim NY in 2011, we thought that “all” had been said. But, as often with Maurizio Cattelan, we were on the wrong track…
What should have been the final greeting of a dazzling career, constituted by artworks which have marked their times, with scandals, profundness, tumult and humor, was actually another of his irreverence. Five years later, Cattelan comes back to work. He chose Monnaie de Paris for his most important exhibition in Europe, and the largest one since his retrospective in New York.
Curated by Chiara Parisi, this exhibition is “deeply” inhabited by the artist. A selection of artworks, those ones whose images remain forever in our mind, will be displayed in the 18th century salons of Monnaie de Paris.
Irreverent, brilliant, mischievous, funny, serious, provocative, cynical, school boyish, Maurizio Cattelan is never where one can expect to find him. Cattelan’s faces are all uppercuts knocking us out. And that constitutes his ultimate paradox, his great ability of transforming a leak into a sublime pirouette: Cattelan will never have been so present in an exhibition, and yet each of his artworks yells his absence.
The effigy of Cattelan, the art of staging, will be the beating heart of the exhibition at Monnaie de Paris. A starting place to answer to his question, as tongue-in-cheek than metaphysics, “is there a life before death?”
Maurizio Cattelan at Monnaie de Paris, until 08.01.17