Retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition at the Guggenheim New York in an extraordinary box set. Photos by Pierpaolo Ferrari (Le Dictateur / Toilet Paper).
Upon the occasion of his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, All, Maurizio Cattelan astonished the art world by announcing his retirement from art, declaring that he would instead focus on the production of his magazine Toilet Paper. For the exhibition, Cattelan hung his entire oeuvre—128 works—from the middle of the Guggenheim's rotunda, in a sensational gesture of both witty irreverence and summary completion. Maurizio Has Left the Building is the artist's documentation of this landmark exhibition. Composed of several unbound signatures of installation photographs by Cattelan's Toilet Paper co-creator Pierpaolo Ferrari, plus drawings by Matteo Nuti, art direction by Sebastiano Mastroeni and text by Caroline Corbetta, this oversize volume conveys the extraordinary multidimensionality of Cattelan's installation. Ferrari's full-color photographs show both individual works in close-up and larger overviews in which Frank Lloyd Wright's famous modernist rotunda becomes visually implicated in Cattelan's decidedly un-modernist swansong gesture, inspiring in the viewer a mixture of awe and amusement. As such, Maurizio Has Left the Building offers the definitive account of one of the most memorable exhibitions in recent history.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Maurizio Cattelan – All at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, from November 2011 to January 2012.
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.
