Maurizio Cattelan

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work appears in excellent and sound condition overall. Here is an 1/8 inch scuff mark located on the figure's left arm. Otherwise, there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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For the artist who professed, "I want religion and blasphemy to collide, as they do in our daily life. Just think of any day of your week: you wake up, you might pray and think about some metaphysical truth. And then two minutes later you are stuck in traffic cursing and swearing and getting mad and anxious. Our life is based on contradiction," Maurizio Cattelan is an artist who clearly seeks to provoke and challenge his audiences. In La Nona Ora, one of the artist's most seminal works, Catellan brazenly commits aesthetic epistemological heresy by dropping a meteor on the holiest man in the Roman Catholic tradition, at the ninth hour, the moment that Jesus Christ was crucified.

La Nona Ora is a dialogue, an invitation to imbue an empty shell with meaning. Cattelan invites us to question whether the work is a serious assault on the Catholic Church or simply an investigation into that which is sacred. Pope John Paul II is rendered in effigy and appears clutching his staff, his body still tense from the meteor's impact. The work may simply be an exercise in satire for the work itself never asserts any veracity. The looney-toon-esque anvil-like meteor and the lack of blood following its impact add a measure of absurdity to the scene leading us to question the artist's intentions. 

      While the original work La Nona Ora, 1999, depicts the fallen icon amidst a mosaic of shattered glass, his frail white frame contrasting dramatically with the deep red carpet he lies upon, the present eponymous work is from an edition of 10 rendered in plaster and executed in 2003. In the vein of Andy Warhol and the banality that results from serial multiplicity, Cattelan dares to replicate this controversial image in a manner even more removed than the original. Gone are the bombastic colors and shards of glass and we are left with a plaster simulacra of Pope John Paul II with a staff in his hand and a meteor on his behind leaving us to wonder if anything is sacred anymore?