MAURIZIO CATTELAN

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 smoothsurfaces 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 characterises 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?’

Cattelan traces the opulent composition of both new works back to the Catholic spiritual tradition in which he was raised, also pointing out that the ease of melting down and reusing gold gives the material a fungible, unfixed nature that allows it to effectively disappear. Even when dealing with such sensitive subjects, however, he remains a ‘Sunday’ artist at heart, avoiding explicit judgment in favour of presenting reality as he observes it.