Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents:
MAURIZIO CATTELAN
Piazza XXIV Maggio, Milan
From May, 5th to June, 6th 2004


The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is pleased to present a new installation by Maurizio Cattelan conceived for one of the most significant sites in the city of Milan, and entirely produced by the Foundation, on view from May 5 through June 6, 2004.

With this new project by Maurizio Cattelan, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues its adventure in the public spaces of the city of Milan: in the monumental setting of Piazza XXIV Maggio—at the crossroads of history, referencing Napoleon's campaigns and World Wars I and II—Maurizio Cattelan stages the epilogue of a macabre fairy tale, an ancient popular ritual and a new urban legend.

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Cattelan's installation in Piazza XXIV Maggio is a popular fable that captures and exorcises the tensions and horrors of our contemporary present. Cattelan's installation is a view on childhood seen as a territory of freedom and fantasy and as a time of violence and terror. Maurizio Cattelan chooses the oldest tree in town and like a magician he infuses the scenario with a collective hallucination, or maybe just a minuscule lie: as in a Medieval pillory or an twisted dream, three children hang from a tree and looking at the truth with their eyes wide open.

The characters and personas that inhabit Maurizio Cattelan's world make ghostly appearances in a personal theatre of the absurd: policemen flipped upside down, stuffed animals hung from the ceiling, icons of power dethroned and publicly mocked, buried fakirs, mechanical puppets chasing visitors across museums ... Suspended between reality and fiction, childlike curiosity and sophomoric rebellion, Maurizio Cattelan's work simulates and subverts the rules of culture and society in a continuous game of detournement, acts of insubordination and symbolical theft.

Constantly exploring different materials, contexts and strategies, Maurizio Cattelan refuses to take any moral or ideological position, concentrating instead on reproducing reality in all its complexities. This systematic practice of ambiguity has placed Maurizio Cattelan among the most interesting artists of today.

Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua in 1960. He has had solo exhibitions in the most distinguished museums worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other recent presentations of his work include exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum in Köln, Germany and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He will present his work at the Musée du Louvre in Paris in October 2004. Cattelan has participated in five editions of the Venice Biennale as well as in many other collective exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, Manifesta and
"Apocalypse" at the Royal Academy in London.

Maurizio Cattelan’s works are part of some of the most important public and private collections worldwide such as: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; Fondation Pinault, Paris; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Elaine Dannheisser Collection, New York; Gilles Fuchs Collection, Paris; Seattle Museum of Contemporary Art, Seattle; Migros Museum, Zurich; F.R.A.C., Languedoc-Roussillon; Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Puteaux; F.R.A.C., Nord-Pas de Calais; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.