Maurizio Cattelan

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York

Frankfurt, Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Maurizio Cattelan, March - December 2007 (another example exhibited)
Houston, The Menil Collection, Raiding, Mining, and Resurrecting: Maurizio Cattelan at The Menil Collection, February - August 2010
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Maurizio Cattelan: All, November - January 2012, cat. no. 99, p. 236, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)
New York, S|2 & Venus Over Manhattan, Maurizio Cattelan: Cosa Nostra, cat. no. 4, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

Franklin Sirmans, Maurizio Cattelan Is There Life Before Death?, New Haven, 2010, pp. 90-91, illustrated in color

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There is evidence of some light wear to the base of all three arms.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Maurizio Cattelan has a deep understanding and highly intellectual approach to art history that is primarily characterized by a distaste for and distrust of the institutionalization of art. Through a long career of art-world subversion, he wants to free us to engage directly with art and come to our own terms with the images presented to us, rather than rely on preconceived notions imposed by art critics, curators, collectors, writers and even in some cases, by artists who aggrandize the myth of art creation rather than the art object. Ave Maria (2007) is one of the penultimate statements of Cattelan's role as the outlaw or outsider who fights against the comfortable suspension of judgment inherent in imposed knowledge. He seeks to liberate art from the realm of the sacred and return it back to the realm of the secular world, demystifying it and forcing us to once again freely question and analyze our own perceptions and ideas of art.

Comprised of three uniformed arms extending bodiless from the wall, Ave Maria engages with the rhetoric surrounding the historically authoritarian salute. Identified as the Roman salute or the saluto Romano, the hailing gesture has historically represented a sense of fraternal dedication to an absolute power. The politically charged imagery, an arm motion that has been deemed a crime in Germany, confronts issues of mass violence, abuse of power and conformity. While most closely identified with the Nazi motion from World War II, Cattelan severs the symbolic tyrannical arm gesture that has been repeated throughout history by such regimes as the Roman Empire, the Italian fascists and Adolf Hitler. It was illustrated by Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii from 1784, which is considered to be the origin of the hand signal portrayed in art. David’s neoclassical painting illustrates a roman legend of three brothers’ obedient solidarity to fight to the death for their country, a responsibility that is established in the painting with a succession of three raised arms, a visual resembling Cattelan’s Ave Maria. Cattelan sardonically weaponizes the three limbs. Blindly aimed at unknown targets like cocked rifles, the three arms allude to the consequential severity of tyrannical ideologies and political subordination that has gone hand in hand throughout history with the archetypal gesture depicted in the present work.