Maurizio Cattelan valuation

Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy, in 1960. He has no formal training in art: from 1982 to 1985 he belonged to Magnetica Attrattive, a Padua group experimenting with video, and he later designed and made wooden furniture in Forlì. Humour and satire are at the centre of his work, which often turns on a simple pun or puts animals in place of people. In the mid-1990s he worked with taxidermy, as in Turisti, the stuffed pigeons he showed in the Italian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and from 1999 he made life-size wax figures, among them La Nona Ora, Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite. Later works include America, a toilet in solid gold, and Comedian, a banana taped to a wall, made in 2019 as an edition of three. In 2011, as his retrospective opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he declared himself retired from art, and returned five years later with a work at the same museum. He has also exhibited at Tate Modern, the Menil Collection, Fondation Beyeler and Moderna Museet, and received the Arnold Bode Prize in 2005.

Alongside unique sculptures and installations he makes editions, such as small marble and resin pieces in editions of ten, so note the edition number and keep the certificate and the gallery invoice. Taxidermy, wax and resin need stable conditions and careful handling, and a buyer will ask how a work has been stored.