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Maurizio
Cattelan was born in 1960 in Padua, Italy, and currently lives and
works in New York.
Since the beginning of his carrier in the early Nineties, Cattelan
has been questioning the ideas of coherence, style, and success. By
mimicking the myths traditionally associated to the art world, Cattelan's
work tries to reflect the complexity of our daily and social interchange,
represented as a series of endless rituals of humiliation and abuse
of power, or, vice versa, as a joyful exercise in schizophrenia.
Split between stardom, laziness and democracy, Cattelan's art grows
in multiple directions, in a continuous exploration of different materials
and strategies, often mediated both from art history and from the
languages of mass media and advertising. For his first participation
at the Venice Biennial in 1993, for example, Cattelan sold his space
to an advertising company, writing a wry comment on the expectations
we project on artists. In 1998, for his one person show at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, he hired an actor who was forced to wear
a gigantic mask with the features of Picasso and had to welcome tourists
and visitors in the museum.
Cattelan's works often verge onto the realm of surrealism, as in his
intervention at the Venice Biennial in 1999, where he presented a
live fakyr buried underground, creating both a striking image of weakness
and submission and yet transforming one of the most important art
event into a freak show. |
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