Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2018 Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet © Maurizio Cattelan 2024
From shock to reflection
Text by curator
Maurizio Cattelan is one of the most precise artists of our time. With edge and humour, he grills his contemporaries and examines our common history. He causes reactions from shock to reflection with norm-breaking works that play with our expectations. Power hierarchies are toppled, and human vulnerabilities and shortcomings are exposed.
When you enter this exhibition, you step into a universe where Cattelan has taken on the Moderna Museet Collection. His own works collide with the museum’s in a series of scenes where art is transferred from its art historic context to wordless confrontations.
The Third Hand, as Cattelan calls his dialogues with the collection, centres on the innate power of art, its ability to spark our imagination. Cattelan has faith in the power of art, but not in the power of institutions. “Power, whatever power, has an expiration date, just like milk,” he once said – and power is twisted and shifted in his encounter with the Moderna Museet Collection.
Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960 in Padua, Italy), lives and works in Milan and New York. Since the 1990s, his practice has become increasingly international and won recognition all over the world. As a self-taught artist, he has often perceived himself as being on the margins, in a position where he could scrutinise the art world from the outside.
In his exhibitions, he has challenged our notions of what an exhibition is – as when he showed his entire artistic output at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011, stipulating that they all had to be hung together, like laundry, from the ceiling of the museum’s rotunda.
