Maurizio Cattelan

Some of Cattelan's better-known works include America, consisting of a solid gold toilet; La Nona Ora, a sculpture depicting a fallen Pope John Paul II who has been hit by a meteorite; and Comedian, a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall as a 2019 limited edition of three, one of which sold for $6.2 million in 2024.

"Frequently morbidly fascinating, Cattelan's humour sets his work above the visual pleasure one-liners," wrote Carol Vogel of The New York Times.

[15] Cattelan's first artwork has been noted as a photo art piece in 1989 entitled Lessico Familiare (Family Syntax), a framed self-portrait in which he is depicted forming a Hand Heart over his naked chest.

[22] One of his best known sculptures, La Nona Ora (1999), consists of an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial costume being crushed by a meteor.

[24][25] In 2002, he co-founded with Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni "The Wrong Gallery", a glass door leading to a 2.5 square foot exhibition space at 516A½ West 20th street in New York City.

[29] From 1996 to 2007, Cattelan collaborated with Dominique Gonzalez-Foster and Paola Manfrin on the publication Permanent Food, an occasional journal consisting of a pastiche of pages torn from other magazines and submissions by artists of similar material.

[33] As part of a public art series at the High Line in 2012, Toiletpaper was commissioned with a billboard at the corner of 10th Avenue and West 18th Street in New York, showing an image of a woman's manicured and jeweled fingers, detached from their hands, emerging from a vibrant blue velvet background.

Toilet Paper is a surrealist pantomime of images that the viewer cannot easily trace back to a starting point, while they've most likely been conjured by popular culture.

It is a whirlwind of loud colors mixed in with the occasional black-and-white photo: "the pictures probe the unconscious, tapping into sublimated perversions and spasms of violence.

[52][53] At a Sotheby's auction in 2004, Cattelan's Ballad of Trotsky (1996), a taxidermic horse suspended by ropes from a ceiling, was sold for $2 million, a record for the artist.

[54] Cattelan was a finalist for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize in 2000, received an honorary degree in Sociology from the University of Trento, Italy.

[64] In 2010, Sicilian artist Giuseppe Veneziano created a representation of Cattelan hanged with a noose around his neck and displayed it in the Vatican.

[65] In 2017, when the Trump administration White House requested the loan of a Vincent van Gogh painting from the Guggenheim collection, Landscape with Snow, the museum's chief curator Nancy Spector suggested instead Cattelan's work America, a sculpture of a gold toilet.

[67] On 27 April 2023 a similar intervention occurred when Noh Hyun-soo, a student from Seoul National University, ate the banana at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art.

La Nona Ora (1999)
Him by Maurizio Cattelan, depicting Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer, exhibited in a courtyard in the former Warsaw Ghetto
Untitled (2001) at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam , Netherlands
La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000) at Rubell Museum in Miami