Maurizio Cattelan

Galerie Emmanuel Perrottin, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2000

Bordeaux, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Présumé innocent (L'art contemporain et l'enfance), 2000, p. 117, illustration of a detail in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Bretigny sur Orge, Espace Jules Verne, Maurizio Cattelan, 1997, n.p., illustrated in colour
Francesco Bonami, et al., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2000, pp. 66, 68 and 69, illustration of a detail in colour
Francesco Bonami, et al., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2003, p. 66, 68 and 69, illustration of a detail in colour

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: The work is in very good condition. Each sheet has artist's pin holes to the top right and left corner and some of them have minor undulation to the lower part of the sheet.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The present installation of drawings is a brilliant and very early example of Maurizio Cattelan's artistic practice. Cattelan's oeuvre revolves around the expression of his life and he provokes subliminal recollections of shared experiences. By manipulating traditional stereotypes, Cattelan simulates and subverts cultural and social conventions in a continuous game of insubordination. He uses art as a vehicle to both verify reality and activate a memory of the past.

The ambiguous text Fare la lotta in di classe é pericoloso plays with double-meaning in the context of academic and social themes. The present work is part of a corpus executed in 1991-92, in which Cattelan exhumes memories from his schooldays, involving his teachers and the educational system being portrayed as more punitive than enlightening. In turn this scenario becomes a metaphor for the wider institutionalising subjugation of the individual within an overbearing and uncaring modern society. Since the beginning of the 1990s Maurizio Cattelan has created an extraordinary body of work, in a variety of different media, which has been exhibited widely and received high critical acclaim. The present work operates on many different levels, offering his viewer symbols whose representations both elucidate and complicate systems of related meaning.