Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan is the best-known Italian artist to have emerged internationally in the 1990s. This mini second edition, updated to include all of the artist's work to the present, represents a unique collaboration between Phaidon and this important artist. Table of content: Interview — Cattelan's 'slippery' personality shines through while critic and Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector offers solid interpretative responses to the subversive strategies behind Cattelan's work. Survey — International curator Francesco Bonami sets the work in the context of recent Italian political and social history. His work-by-work analysis is divided into the main themes in Cattelan's work (autobiography, the allegorical use of animals, politics, and so forth) to draw together coherently Cattelan's varied body of work. Focus — Curator Barbara Vanderlindern offers a first hand response to the work Cattelan made for Manifesta 2, 1998, co-curated by Vanderlinden): an untitled work consisting of a living uprooted tree, growing in a block of dirt inside the exhibition space itself. Artist's Choice — The two selections combine issues dear to the artist's heart: adolescence, sex and death. In Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, the teenage Alexander Portnoy describes his new-found obsession with masturbation; and suicide letters are chosen from... Or Not To Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (ed. Marc Etkind, 1997). (True to the artist's characteristic avoidance of responsibility, Cattelan has asked an anonymous editorial assistant to select one of his Artist's Choices on his behalf.) Artist's Writings — Previous interviews are included from the artist's early years — including an interview notoriously 'stolen' from another artist — and a recent discussion with the curator of his 2003 'retrispective' at Los Angeles MoCA, Massimilano Gioni Update — Maurizio Ccatelan's closest collaborator and spokesperson, Massimiliano Gioni, offers an especially insightful look at this enigmatic, uncompromising artist, examining the artist's uncanny, often dangerous will to provoke his audience. Recent examples include The Elerventh Hour, a realistic sculpture of the Pop being hit by a meteorite, or a wax scultpure of miniaturized Adolf Hitler. Chronology and Bibliography