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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Opens Maurizio Cattelan. All

The The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Maurizio Cattelan: Al the first retrospective of the internationally acclaimed artist’s work, on view from November 4, 2011, to January 22, 2012.


Maurizio Cattelan: All, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960, Padua, Italy) has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures that reveal contradictions at the core of today’s society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing critique of authority and the abuse of power. Maurizio Cattelan: All brings together some 130 works—examples of virtually everything the artist has produced since 1989—and presents the works en masse, strung seemingly haphazardly from the oculus of the museum’s rotunda in a site-specific installation. An interactive, multimedia mobile app—the first the Guggenheim has ever produced—will offer both museum visitors and users off-site an enhanced experience of the exhibition that includes images, texts about the works, and video commentary by many of the artist’s key collaborators. In addition to a fully illustrated catalogue, a new edition of Cattelan’s magazine Toilet Paper, featuring images conceived and photographed by Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, will be presented on the occasion of the exhibition.

Maurizio Cattelan: All is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The Leadership Committee for Maurizio Cattelan: All is gratefully acknowledged.

Exhibition Overview
“Cattelan’s career resists summation by any traditional exhibition format,” said Spector. “Many of his early, action-based meditations are impossible to reconstruct, and his singular, iconic objects function best in isolation. Maurizio Cattelan: All is thus a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work within the context of a conventional chronological retrospective. The artist has resisted this model, creating instead a site-specific installation that cunningly celebrates its rebelliousness. Perversely encapsulating Cattelan’s career to date in an overly literal, three-dimensional catalogue raisonné, the installation lampoons the idea of comprehensiveness.”

The Installation
The dramatic site-specific installation is visible to visitors on the ground floor and on each ascending ramp at varied heights. Hoisted by rope as if on a gallows, the objects explicitly reveal the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work. The exhibition is an exercise in disrespect: the artist has hung up his work like laundry to dry. Like all of his individual objects, the new installation resonates with multiple interpretive valences. Cattelan has certainly used the motif of suspension before, most notably in the poetically elongated sculpture created from a taxidermied horse, Novecento (1997), but here it takes on epic proportions. In total, the installation looks like a mass execution – and will, for the duration of the exhibition, constitute an overarching, tragic artwork in its own right. – guggenheim.org

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