Maurizio Cattelan's Bold, Humorous and Irreverent Art Hanging in the Middle of the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda

"La Nona Ora" (1999) An eerily lifelike sculpture of Pope John Paul II hit by a large meteorite

"Now" (2004) an effigy of a serene and barefoot John F. Kennedy lying in state, a martyr to a shattered American idealism seen from the perspective of a disillusioned present. 

"Him" (2001) a rendering of Adolf Hitler in the scale of a young boy, kneeling preposterously in a pose of supplication.

"Novecento" (1997), taxidermied horse, and "Daddy, Daddy" (2008) the puppet Pinocchio

A retrospective of the works of Italian contemporary artist MAURIZIO CATTELAN opened last night at the Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition is considered one of the "strangest, most audacious exhibitions in the Guggenheim's half-century history." A hanging collage of Cattelan's artworks, the site-specific installation called "MAURIZIO CATTELAN: ALL" involves suspending several thousand pounds' and millions of dollars' worth of internationally collected art from cables attached to aluminum truss installed almost 90 feet in the air in a disorienting, haphazard mass under the museum's elegant glass dome. The unconventional presentation brings together Cattelan's works created since 1989, including sculptures, paintings, photographs and works on paper. Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art, with themes obtained from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self. The exhibit runs through January 22, 2012. The Guggenheim Museum is located in Manhattan's Upper East Side at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. More information from the Guggenheim Museum website.

"theanyspacewhatever" at the GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

On exhibit at the GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM until January 7th is "thespacewhatever." This exhibit includes a drowning Pinocchio called "DADDY DADDY" (pictured above) by MAURIZIO CATTELAN.

From the GUGGENHEIM website:

OCTOBER 24, 2008–JANUARY 7, 2009

During the 1990s, a number of artists claimed the exhibition itself as a medium. Working independently and in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the discrete aesthetic object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding in its physical and temporal parameters. For these artists, an exhibition can be a film, a novel, a shared meal, a social space, a performance, or a journey. Using the museum as a platform for projects that reach beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation.

The Guggenheim’s exhibition, theanyspacewhatever, brings together 10 artists who exemplify this creative impulse: Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. While these artists all employ markedly different aesthetic strategies and do not constitute a formally affiliated group, their varying practices are conceptually unified by a desire to shift the terms of artistic practice beyond mimetic representation, and in doing so engender a kind of activated spectatorship. Invited to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, they determined, in discussion with Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, that the presentation should comprise a series of individual projects that intersect and overlap in the museum’s spiraling rotunda. This layered installation thus reflects the dialectic between the group and the individual that informs their shared histories.

This exhibition is sponsored by Hugo Boss. Additional support is provided by The Waldorf=Astoria Collection; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, a program of FACE; and The Grand Marnier Foundation. The Guggenheim Museum gratefully acknowledges the Leadership Committee for theanyspacewhatever.