MAURIZIO CATTELAN

Cattelan’s highly provocative juxtapositions of iconoclastic imagery with symbolically charged materials elicit strong, often visceral responses—his work has been attacked, stolen, and even eaten. In_Bones_, the artist furthers the alignment of creation and destruction in stainless-steel panels, plated in 24-karat gold, each of which has been “modified” by one or two gunshots. These brutalized surfaces serve as metaphors for creation and transformation, the choice of large-caliber ammunition amplifying their symbolism by ensuring that each hole is a decisive mark, the trace of a singular violent event.

The new works’ formally simple arrangement recalls Conceptual art and Minimalism in its emphasis on the interaction of form and environment; here, destruction generates new spatial possibilities, the torn and punctured sheets also suggesting desecrated relics. There are echoes here, too, of William Burroughs’s shotgun paintings and Gustav Metzger’s “auto-destructive” art. Further, the works’ opulent composition in gold—a material that can be melted down and reused, giving it an unfixed nature that allows it to effectively disappear—contributes to its resonance with the troubled relationship between material wealth and the accessibility of deadly weapons.

Notre Dame (2025), the exhibition’s single freestanding sculpture, arose from Cattelan’s desire to produce an object endowed with a mythic presence and the familiarity of history, an ancient-seeming artefact displaced to a contemporary setting. The white marble boulder, with its incongruous horns, embodies a tension between the natural and the imagined, suggesting an unknown deity in fossilised form. The bull-like appendages connote power and virility, again forging a connection to long-established ritual and prompting reconsideration of a familiar structure. Similarly, the couch on which the form rests turns a space of domestic comfort into something primal and uncanny. Collectively then, the gold panels and marble sculpture explore a raft of opposing forces: domesticity and wildness, force and resistance, creation and destruction, perseverance and loss.

Also opening on April 8, and on view concurrently with the exhibition, Cattelan is taking over Gagosian Burlington Arcade with an exhibition of watercolours, editions, and other works. Francesco Bonami’s book Stuck: Maurizio Cattelan—The Unauthorized Autobiography, published by Gagosian, is being rereleased in a new and updated English edition in conjunction with the opening alongside Leftovers: The Bonami’s Cattelans, a new volume of his drawings also published by Gagosian.