The joker and the pope, by Vlad Dobritan

       About Maurizio Cattelan, there are not too many things to be said, mostly because he says everything he wants to by himself. He does this in his work, as an artist, as a curator, he just says all it’s needed to be said about himself.

        I will save myself the trouble to copy any information about him from the internet, he deserves more than a presentation of his biography, so if you crave to find out when he was born, where, who his parents were, and other such things you could just as well use Google or just ask Silviu Mănăstire to find out who Maurizio Cattelan really is.

       Now that I have said what I’m not going to do here, let’s start with what I’m going to do.

First I will tell you how I started to get familiar with his work, and you might be surprised, but his

 “The ninth hour” was unknown to me the first time I saw this work In fact, beside his work as a photographer  I didn’t know anything about him. You might wonder how?  The answer is simple,

I first saw his works in his magazine, Toiletpaper Magazine, magazine about you can read in my other post called “toilet paper”,  I won’t talk here about his photography. I will mention instead  his work as a sculptor.

 

The ninth hour – the jewel of the satirical sculptures, depicting his holiness, Pope John Paul II, carrying the cross, struck down by a meteorite.

This is a good example of Cattelan’s

critical thinking and humor.

Since the 90s Cattelan is a huge figure in the art world. Besides his work as an artist, he spent a lot of time  curating and publishing, about his last publishing work, you can find out in my next article