Maurizio Has Left the Building: Retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan's Last Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum New York

Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. Upon the occasion of his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, <I>All</I>, Cattelan astonished the art world by announcing his retirement from art, declaring that he would instead focus on the production of his magazine <I>Toilet Paper</I>. For the exhibition, Cattelan hung his entire oeuvre--128 works--from the middle of the Guggenheim's rotunda, in a sensational gesture of both witty irreverence and summary completion. <I>Maurizio Has Left the Building</I> is the artist's documentation of this landmark exhibition. Created by Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, the publication is composed of several unbound signatures of installation photographs, with drawings by Matteo Nuti, text by Caroline Corbetta, under the art direction of Sebastiano Mastroeni. This oversize volume conveys the multidimensionality of Cattelan's last installation. — Testi: Corbetta Caroline, Mastroeni Sebastiano et al. pagg. 72; rileg. rigida. Editore: Les Presses du Reél, Dijon, 2012.