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For the 1st time in about two decades, contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan opened a new solo gallery exhibition. Showcasing gilded panels pulverized with bullet holes and a urinating fountain sculpture, Sunday grapples with problems of violence and inequality in the United States. The exhibition is now on look at by means of June 15, 2024 at Gagosian’s 522 West 21st Road spot in New York City. Cattelan is a intriguing figure in the modern day art planet. Occasionally dismissed as a prankster, his profoundly political artworks have a tendency to incite essential discourse—and often spark outrage.
Sunday Juxtaposes Gold and Guns
The piece for which the exhibition Sunday is named is a wall of square metal panels plated in 24-carat gold. To generate the set up, Maurizio Cattelan employed industry experts at a gun selection in Brooklyn to perform as a firing squad. They shot about 20,000 rounds of ammunition into the steel panels working with legally-obtained semiautomatic weapons and shotguns. Just about every of the 64 panels is about 54 inches tall and weighs 80 lbs, the size of an ordinary 10-year-old child. Mounted on a solitary wall, Sunday is a major-handed juxtaposition of the gilded glory of wealth and the horrific destruction of gun violence.
“When I read through the entrance website page of the newspapers, all they talk about is violence,” Cattelan instructed The New York Moments. “We are absolutely immersed in violence each individual working day, and we’ve gotten used to it. The repetition has manufactured us settle for violence as inevitable.”
November is Cattelan’s Initial Fountain Piece
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In entrance of the golden wall of bullet-ridden panels, Maurizio Cattelan set up his 1st fountain sculpture titled November. A marble-carved, seemingly unhoused person reclines on a bench, holding his uncovered phallus, which spurts out h2o. Cattelan intended the sculpture to depict “the swaths of people who are invisible in culture.” November brings public urination into an exceptional substantial-end room, confronting viewers with the actuality of New York City’s housing crisis—which is happening just further than the shut doorways of the spacious blue-chip Gagosian Gallery.
Exhibition curator Francesco Bonami thematically connected November to its gilded counterpart Sunday by posing the question, “If you’re absolutely free to invest in an assault rifle in a office shop, what is erroneous with pissing in general public?”
Maurizio Cattelan is No Stranger to Controversy
Bonami discussed, “Maurizio is a political artist—not political in the sense that he’s presenting a placement, but political in that he offers with society’s issues and current occasions, and he usually touches a uncooked nerve.”
Sunday is much from the first time that Maurizio Cattelan has deliberately provoked the general public with his artwork. In 2019, Cattelan’s Comic—comprised of a banana duct-taped to a wall—sold for 6 figures at Artwork Basel Miami. The conceptual artwork sparked a media frenzy, as perfectly as a tongue-and-cheek companion piece, Hungry Artist by David Datuna. In the identical 12 months, Cattelan’s satirical nevertheless absolutely purposeful golden toilet sculpture, controversially titled America, was famously stolen from England’s Blenheim Palace.
