The Art Newspaper

The end of an art prankster

“After Venice and New York my art as you know it is finished,” says Maurizio Cattelan

By Cristina Ruiz. Web only
Published online: 01 June 2011

One of the last? Cattelan's new commission for the Venice Biennale could be one of his final hyper-real sculptures if the artist sticks to his promise and changes tracks

VENICE. The Italian artist and prankster Maurizio Cattelan has announced his intention to stop making the hyperrealist sculptures for which he is known. "I have come to the end of a cycle of my art," he told The Art Newspaper at a reception in Venice on the eve of the biennale preview opening. "I have to get out of a system which seduces you into repeating yourself," he said, adding that his upcoming Guggenheim retrospective in New York, which opens in November, had provided him with a good opportunity to look back on his career.

"After New York, I'm finished with the sculptures. I can reinvent myself as a new artist, perhaps as a photographer," added Cattelan who has recently launched a photography magazine called Toilet Paper. "Art is like therapy. If it works, you don't have to see a therapist. You have to ensure it keeps working," he said.

If what Cattelan says is true, then the current biennale may be one of the last opportunities to see newly-commissioned work by the artist. For Bice Curiger's biennale exhibition, Cattelan has expanded an installation, entitled The Tourists, which he first made for the Venice Biennale in 1997. It consists of a giant flock of two thousand pigeons which peer menacingly down on visitors to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini from beams, pipes and rafters in every hall of the building.

The flock's current title, The Others, is appropriate for our times said the artist: "We're so paranoid about being watched by strangers in our midst, by those who frighten us.”

As well as the birds in the biennale, Cattelan has several works on display in Venice in the current exhibitions at the Punta della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi, the private museums owned by French billionaire François Pinault. These include We, 2010 a sculpture featuring two versions of the artist lying in bed.