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We are completely immersed in violence every day, and we’ve gotten used to it. The repetition has made us accept violence as inevitable.
—Maurizio Cattelan
Gagosian is pleased to announce the opening of Sunday, Maurizio Cattelan’s first solo gallery exhibition in more than two decades and his solo debut at Gagosian. Similar to America—a functional solid gold toilet that he installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2016—Cattelan’s new project, which is on view at the gallery’s 522 West 21st Street location, once again challenges the contradictions of American society and culture, and touches on sensitive issues faced by the world at large.
In a new installation, Sunday (2024), Cattelan compounds the response to economic inequality embodied by America (2016), using precious metal to deconstruct the country’s relationship to the accessibility of weapons (a condition against which privilege affords no defense). Panels of stainless steel, plated in 24-karat gold, have been “modified” by gunfire. The components’ formerly smooth surfaces are left riddled with craters and holes, evoking a history of guns in art that stretches from Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69) to Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and William Burroughs’s shotgun paintings.
Visitors to Gagosian’s 21st Street location are immediately confronted by a towering, 17-foot-tall wall of the gilded panels that stretches some 68 feet wide. In front of it is November (2024), a marble fountain that portrays a slouching figure urinating on the ground. Cattelan characterizes the work as “a monument to marginality,” an image of a reality that we habitually ignore. Echoing Manneken Pis (1619), a famous public sculpture of a boy urinating into a fountain, it presents the viewer with an uncomfortable contravention of societal norms. But, as Bonami demands, “If you’re free to buy an assault rifle in a department store, what’s wrong with pissing in public?”
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Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday Painter
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgment
For his first solo exhibition in China, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Maurizio Cattelan presented a selection of twenty-nine works that spanned his career. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Bonami, who joins the artist here in a wide-ranging conversation about some of the iconic artworks, the question of flaws, and what it means to be taken seriously.