Maurizio Cattelan Takes the Piss Out of the Art World

The artist Maurizio Cattelan loves to play, and he especially loves playing God. There was his smiting of Pope John Paul II in the hyperrealistic 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora in which a meteorite crushes His Holiness. (Miracle of miracles: This did not prevent the Vatican from asking Cattelan to front its pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.) There was his resurrection of Hitler in 2001 with his child-size, praying sculpture of the Führer, Him. And then there was Cattelan’s own resurrection in 2016, when he ended a very brief retirement by installing a solid gold toilet at the Guggenheim and calling it America. One thing he hasn’t been eager to resurrect is his relationship with commercial galleries. Until this spring: The 63-year-old Italian artist is back in Chelsea with Sunday, his first solo gallery exhibition in over two decades and his first with Gagosian.

He has shown with museums and art fairs during this time. (He’s even made work for New York.) So why not galleries? “Sometimes with galleries you have less control. They’re testing me; we are testing each other,” Cattelan told me. He glanced at the Gagosian reps who eyed him warily. “No? I shouldn’t say this on the record?” “It’s absolutely too late,” said the gallery manager with a sigh. The installation has been challenging: One of the show’s two works is Sunday (2024), comprising individual 24-karat-plated panels that a crew of professionals shot through with bullets, riddling them with dents and holes. The panels had to be mounted in a long, horizontal procession along the gallery’s back wall. When I asked Cattelan if he’d ever used weapons in his work before, he smiled and said, “I did rob a couple of banks.” (He’s about to do so again: Conveniently for the gallery, each of Sunday’s panels can be sold separately.) In the middle of the floor lies the marble sculpture November (2024), a barefoot, indigent man reclining on a bench and shielding his face with one hand while he holds his dribbling penis with the other. They’re calling it a fountain, but there’s no drainage. Right now, the plan is to let the water piss right onto the floor.

America was a comment on the availability of art-world bullshit. Sunday is a comment on the availability of guns. November, however, is another one of his resurrections. Although Cattelan has been making sculptures of homeless figures for years — he says he sees them as a way to force oblivious art viewers to pay attention to the “invisible” people of society — he modeled this one after his longtime friend and business partner Lucio Zotti, who died in September. He admitted that his friend (who wasn’t homeless) hadn’t wanted to be shown in his work. He knows Zotti would not have been happy. “But not because of the peeing,” said Cattelan. “I’m sure he would’ve liked that.”