Maurizio Cattelan: All Things Hanging in Guggenheim

Maurizio Cattelan – one of the most influential art pranksters and agent provocateurs today – has turned the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a floating labyrinth with his hanging exhibition featuring effigies, surrogates and taxidermy animals. Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, worked with Cattelan in putting the show All together. She is reassuring that all animals in the exhibition have a soothing and empathetic function as well as that they all have died a natural death.

Cattelan’s 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 cultural critique.

Cattelan has never been satisfied with traditional way of exhibiting his work. He continues this tradition with hanging all his peaces and alter egos with a complex construction from the roof of Guggenheim, letting them dangle and create a somewhat overwhelming atmosphere. Standing below all his artwork must feel like Cattelan’s whole world is about to fall on top of you. And yet, when you’re going around Maurizio’s work, you have the

The retrospective exhibition opened November 4 and will close January 22 2012.

For more information, visit Guggenheim online.