Maurizio Cattelan has been the art world’s premier enfant terrible from the earliest days of his practice, and Untitled (Bar) demonstrates – with a typified formal modesty – the superb, cognisant wit of the Italian artist. Born in Padua in 1960, Cattelan would come of age in his native Italy dogged by social and political upheaval, amidst a deepening economic divide between the North and South. Renowned for his playful satire, the artist has cultivated a reputation for creating art that boldy questions ingrained social norms, looking to shock and provoke in equal measure. Created in 1997, the present work was made in the same year that the artist was chosen to represent Italy at the Venice Biennale, where alongside more established artists, including Ettore Spaletti and Enzo Cucchi, Cattelan exhibited Turisti, 1997, a collection of tongue-in-cheek taxidermied pigeons that both challenged and paid tribute to the legacy of Arte Povera. Another version of Untitled (Bar) rendered in red and with a different font was later exhibited in 2011 at the artist’s Guggenheim Retrospective in New York, alongside the infamous golden toilet; a more recent version of which went missing from Blenheim Palace in 2019.

In the present work, Cattelan has appropriated a generic sign commonly used in Italy for bars and cafes. True to his tongue-in-cheek spirit, the artist has left the ‘A’ unlit, creating the illusion of a broken bulb. Stemming from a long lineage of artists who have taken bars, restaurants and revellers as their subject matter – including Impressionist giant Édouard Manet, who depicted the Bar at the Folies Bergère in 1882 – the present work is perhaps a comment on the stereotype of Italian negligence, in which Cattelan uses humour and self-deprecation to engage with his viewer. Yet, despite its innate humour, Untitled (Bar) explores very real human anxieties. Indeed, the work’s comedy is tinged by the insecurity and fear that accompany prosperity, a tragicomic nod to the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition with which the artist is often compared. Like so many of Cattelan's sculptures - his suicidal squirrel, horse in limbo or hiding ostrich – there is a mirroring in which the artist grapples with themes of human weaknesses, limitations and failings. Cattelan has observed, “I’m not really sure satire is the key to my work. Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality, whereas I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art… I’m always borrowing pieces – crumbs really – of everyday reality. If you think my work is very provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don’t react to it” (Maurizio Cattelan cited in: Francesco Bonami, Nancy Spector and Barbara Vanderlinden, Eds., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2000, p. 17).

In characteristic tomfoolery, Cattelan frequently takes the everyday as his subject, injecting the ordinary into the art world. To this end, Cattelan’s cultivated persona is itself integral to his art practice. “We live in the empire of marketing, spectacle and seduction,’ the artist says, ‘so one of the roles of artists and curators is to deconstruct those strategies, to resist their logic, to use them, and/or find new means of activism against them” (Ibid., p. 136). Indeed, Cattelan has a reputation in the art world of playing the clown, a trickster of sorts, juggling shamelessly with the traditions of art, literature and popular culture. It is true that much of his humour is reminiscent of the age-old Italian tradition of comedy; actors such as Toto and Alberto Sordi come to mind, figures who encapsulate the notion of Italian parody. In many ways, Cattelan himself uses similar techniques as his art embraces the absurd, the ironic, and the witty to make critical commentary on the state of art and modern life.