Verzameling: Maurizio Cattelan

Born in Padua in 1960, Maurizio Cattelan's production ranges from artworks for exhibitions and museums to home decor objects. Art, design and communications merge in his work that is not intended to be functional but to bear a recognisable aesthetic and, at times, a provocative message. In the early years of his artistic career, Cattelan devoted himself to producing non-functional objects, conceptual sculptures made by welding and assembling recycled elements. He made his official debut in 1991 at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, where he presented "Stadium 1991" - a long table-football board flanked on one side by 11 players from the Cesena team and on the other by 11 Senegalese immigrants, employed as workers in the Veneto region. As on this occasion, Cattelan would continue to propose provocative pieces combining sculpture and performance. He quickly became well-known for initiatives and happenings that attracted the attention of journalists and an increasingly broad public.

Although he has always worked across disciplines, Cattelan's encounter with design came more recently. With photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, in 2010, he launched the magazine "Toilet Paper". He devoted himself almost exclusively to this project for several years, allowing him to investigate the "thousand lives an image can have" in great depth. From that point, he developed a series of communications and art direction projects in collaboration with fashion, product, and design brands and other companies. For Seletti, he created numerous successful furnishings, accessories, and conceptual collections inspired by the "Toiletpaper" aesthetic.

The same appraoch was used in projects of different kinds, from the Lavazza coffee machine to the limited edition Dom Pérignon bottles to Kenzo advertising campaigns to Santoni shoes and New Yorker illustrations. His work moves outside art galleries to mix with fashion, design, advertising, entering shops and, consequently, people's homes, pursuing his goal of direct unfiltered contact with people.