Maurizio Cattelan, All in One

By Michele Robecchi 11/1/11

View Slideshow Maquettes for the model for “Maurizio Cattelan: All,” 2011. Photo Zeno Zotti.; A version of the untitled installation with one figure and three flag poles, at the 1st Seville International Biennial, 2004. Photo courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.;

New York For most of his career, the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) has been trying to escape the pressures of the art system, attacking it with a sarcastic humor that he often directs against himself as well. Now, he seems to have yielded to its temptations. “All,” his exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum opening Nov. 4, is the most comprehensive survey of his work to date, with the entirety of his oeuvre assembled for the very first time. There, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda, it forms a single, site-specific installation—although, with more than 120 works suspended from the ceiling, not, perhaps, in the conventional sense of the term. In late September, I took advantage of the opportunity to discuss with Cattelan his past, present and future, and to find out why the man who always loathed the idea of a retrospective finally decided to look back.