Maurizio Cattelan: Susurro

Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy, in 1960, and since the early 1990s has been internationally recognized for his humorous and ironic works which provoke and challenge the limits of contemporary value systems. Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective, Sussurro, will be showcased at the Serralves Villa, a 1930s Art Deco house. The exhibition brings together a selection of works deeply connected to history, reflecting Cattelan's approach to art. In addition to the pieces displayed in the Villa, sculptures by the artist will be installed throughout the Serralves Park. Together, these settings offer a unique contextualization of both Maurizio Cattelan´s work and of Serralves Park and Villa.

Most of the works selected for Sussurro demonstrate Maurizio Cattelan’s interest in history: historical changes, historical trauma, and historical icons. The times of transition, these in-betweens, seem to captivate Cattelan. The hanging, elusive moment between childhood and adulthood, between life and death, between historical eras, between laughter and sobs, is the source of his iconography. He turns these moments into icons.

Cattelan has conceived his work as a series of saynètes populated by a cast of characters ranging from, and raging with, historical figures, self-portraits, friends and acquaintances, a bestiary, children, to familiar objects, locations and images. A détournement… a family of misfits, including direct references to some of his ancestors: Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Giovanni Anselmo, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Carlo Collodi, Walt Disney, Günter Grass, Volker Schlöndorff, Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick… and between all the lines, Andy Warhol, for his furtive relationship to public image, his status as an image-maker, his entrepreneurial and publisher scheme, and his obsession with death.

The saynètes demonstrate an understanding of space that is quasi-theatrical or cinematographic. Locations, as the Serralves Villa, are key; framing, angles and sightlines are never innocent, nor is Maurizio Cattelan; and the overall context is a defining perception of the work. Scenography and art directing are as important in his work as the historical or cultural references. His conception of space and the way we, as visitors, encounter the works, is fully informed by the legacy of conceptual and minimal art, the phenomenological approach to space and to the awareness of space. The way the objects are strategically positioned, oriented in a room, on a public square, affects and informs our apprehension and reading of the works.

Sussurro is to Serralves what Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptations of Saint Anthony is to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. The Tentation de Lisbonne has now its symmetrical with the Tentation de Porto. Bosch’s painting is an exacerbated spectacle of human madness, the vision of a world spinning towards an end with the background of Biblical allegory of good and bad, the psychotic vision of decay where humans and animals dance towards their damnation on a scorched earth. With Bosch, grotesque and humor, mimicry and blasphemy are extracted from the world and expose, iconically, the complicity between humanity and corruption. Images are salvation.

Maurizio Cattelan breaks in a culture in which the question of the place, the role, the veracity of images is at the center of an endemic malaise and he provides answers with images that are themselves effractions imbued with a malaise. This malaise might be our laughter.

Maurizio Cattelan’s visual aphorisms are exercises in re-routing, hacking a broad database of images deeply embedded in history, culture, belief systems and in our taboos. Sussurro speaks out loudly for those who want, and may not want, to hear.

The exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Philippe Vergne, Director of the Museum.

The exhibition was supported by Gagosian Gallery and Perrotin Gallery.

Exhibition book
With a visual essay by Maurizio Cattelan and essays by Cecilia Alemani, Bernard Blistène, and Philippe Vergne, the book Sussurro reveals three different and knowledgeable perspectives on the work of this great artist and will be available in the Bookshop and on the Serralves Shop website.