On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument: no longer an immobile place of celebration, but a critical space of removal and transformation, promoting new relationships with both history and the present.
Parola reflects on the changing concept of the monument and how cultural institutions choose to deal with layered and sometimes contradictory symbols. Lorenzo Giusti, curator of the exhibition, accompanies the essay with an insight on the works presented in order to show how, in Cattelan's work, symbols stratify, shift, and contradict each other. How the imperial eagle becomes a vulnerable body; how the nineteenth-century statue dedicated to Garibaldi is turned into a pedestal for something else. Who? A grandson on his grandfather's shoulders? A new Garibaldian? Or a little vandal mocking ancient values? By so doing, he notes how between history and nature, cracks, fractures, and new possibilities may be opened up.
After
Rachel Whiteread by Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis and
Sonia Boyce by Brandon LaBelle and
Ernesto Neto by Emanuele Coccia,
You Don't Make a Masterpiece... is the fourth book in a series of short essay collections inspired by the site-specific art projects specially conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione, a symbolic, time-honored location within the city of Bergamo that embodies the values of community life and participation. The artist was asked to name an author who interests her—be it a researcher, a philosopher or a scholar—and whose thinking could be said to underpin the project, with a view to finding a path through the complexities of the present day, starting from the work produced but without necessarily lingering on it.
Lorenzo Giusti (Ph.D) is an Italian art historian, curator and writer, director of
GAMeC in Bergamo.
Lisa Parola, graduated in History of Modern Art from the University of Turin, is the co-author of publications and research works, particularly on the themes related to cultural politics, the contemporary art system, public space and territory.
Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960 in Padova, Italy, lives in New York and Milan) 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
is one of the leading
contemporary artist and his works are much desired collector's items that often reach
astronomically high prices at auction sales—although the artist is not dead yet.
He runs the artist's magazine
Permanent Food,
Charley and
Toilet Paper.
