Maurizio Cattelan: All #12 @The Guggenheim
December 2011.
Maurizio Cattelan: All is thus a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work in the context of a conventional chronological retrospective. Characteristically, the artist resisted this model, creating instead a site-specific installation that cunningly celebrates its rebelliousness. The exhibition brings together virtually everything the artist has produced since 1989 and presents the works en masse, strung seemingly haphazardly from the oculus of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. Perversely encapsulating Cattelan’s career to date in an overly literal, three-dimensional catalogue raisonné, the installation lampoons the idea of comprehensiveness. The exhibition is an exercise in disrespect: the artist has hung up his work like laundry to dry. Like all of his individual objects, the new installation resonates with multiple interpretive valences. Cattelan has certainly used the motif of suspension before, most notably in the poetically elongated sculpture created from a taxidermied horse, Novecento (20th century, 1997), but here it takes on epic proportions. Hoisted by rope as if on a gallows, the objects explicitly reveal the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work. In total, the installation looks like a mass execution, and constitutes, for its duration, an overarching, tragic artwork in its own right.
Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His 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 critique of authority and the abuse of power.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (often referred to as "The Guggenheim") is a museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States.
It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it is one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks. The museum opened on October 21, 1959, ten years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim and six months after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright.
From 2005 to 2008 the museum underwent an extensive renovation.
The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics upon completion,though today it is widely revered. From the street, the building looks like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art "look like a Protestant barn."
From Wikipedia
The Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wright's attempts to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture. His inverted ziggurat (a stepped or winding pyramidal temple of Babylonian origin) dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, Wright whisked people to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries were divided like the membranes in citrus fruit, with self-contained yet interdependent sections. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another.
Maurizio Cattelan: All #12 @The Guggenheim
December 2011.
Maurizio Cattelan: All is thus a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work in the context of a conventional chronological retrospective. Characteristically, the artist resisted this model, creating instead a site-specific installation that cunningly celebrates its rebelliousness. The exhibition brings together virtually everything the artist has produced since 1989 and presents the works en masse, strung seemingly haphazardly from the oculus of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. Perversely encapsulating Cattelan’s career to date in an overly literal, three-dimensional catalogue raisonné, the installation lampoons the idea of comprehensiveness. The exhibition is an exercise in disrespect: the artist has hung up his work like laundry to dry. Like all of his individual objects, the new installation resonates with multiple interpretive valences. Cattelan has certainly used the motif of suspension before, most notably in the poetically elongated sculpture created from a taxidermied horse, Novecento (20th century, 1997), but here it takes on epic proportions. Hoisted by rope as if on a gallows, the objects explicitly reveal the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work. In total, the installation looks like a mass execution, and constitutes, for its duration, an overarching, tragic artwork in its own right.
Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His 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 critique of authority and the abuse of power.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (often referred to as "The Guggenheim") is a museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States.
It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it is one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks. The museum opened on October 21, 1959, ten years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim and six months after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright.
From 2005 to 2008 the museum underwent an extensive renovation.
The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics upon completion,though today it is widely revered. From the street, the building looks like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art "look like a Protestant barn."
From Wikipedia
The Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wright's attempts to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture. His inverted ziggurat (a stepped or winding pyramidal temple of Babylonian origin) dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, Wright whisked people to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries were divided like the membranes in citrus fruit, with self-contained yet interdependent sections. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another.