Maurizio cattelan sculpture hitler biography
How much penance do the atrocities that Adolf Hitler committed in his lifetime require to be forgiven? This is perhaps the question which Maurizio Cattelan wanted to arouse in his audience when he drew a picture of the fascist leader in a kneeling position.
There is nothing wrong with someone kneeling in prayer. In fact, it is an aspect of humanity that keeps us humble. With this in mind, it is hard to imagine that the person seeking forgiveness exercised untold torture on fellow human beings. If approached from behind, one cannot help but marvel at the self-discipline and commitment that this young boy eludes.
It is not until one gets close enough that they realize that the neatly pressed schoolboy attire, fresh raven hair and well-polished shoes actually belong to a leader whose name still raises goosebumps in the present day.
Most of Cattelan&#;s works are part soulful, part playful, and part autobiographical. The artists said that while growing up in his home village of Padua, he saw himself as an outcast trying to escape the poverty he was brought up with.
Cattelan&#;s mother died when he was just 18 years, forcing him to start working early. He sold holy statues in a church but later was expelled after drawing a mustache on effigies of a saint. Cattelan worked for a short time as a nurse and at a morgue as an embalmer. But it was his time as a carpenter that got him into art.
We might never fully understand the inspiration behind Him, which, even in comparison to other works by Cattelan that were created at the same time, stands out as the most shocking piece on display.
In his defense, Maurizio Cattelan has distanced himself from provocative art but instead chooses to refer to himself as a realistic artist. By borrowing pieces of reality from different eras throughout history, he has created classics like Him.
To choose to use Hitler as the subject of an art piece is rather bold as he represents such profound evil that it is even hard to come
Maurizio Cattelan
The self-portrait Lessico Familiare, created in , is considered his first work of art, depicting the artist forming a heart on his bare chest with his hands. But his official debut coincides with the presentation of the work Stadium at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna: 11 players of the Cesena team and as many Senegalese immigrants, employed as labourers in the Veneto region, compete in a game of table football at the extremities of a very long foosball table.
He moved to New York in
From the very beginning, Cattelan has made fun of the same art world by which he has often been targeted, even incorporating criticism of him into his work to emphasise it. Jonathan P. Binstock, curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, called him “one of the great post-Duchampian artists and also a smartass”.
For Errotin, le vrai Lapin (), a work exhibited on the occasion of the opening of the gallery of Emmanuel Lapin, a gallery owner and notorious womanizer, Cattelan persuaded him to wear a giant pink rabbit costume shaped like a phallus, playing with words: “lapin” in French means precisely rabbit.
For Another Fucking Readymade (), made for an exhibition at the de Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, he stole the entire contents of another artist’s exhibition to pretend it was his own. The police had to insist that he return the loot, threatening him with arrest.
Grotesque comedy and disguises have always characterised his practice. In , a volunteer paraded through SITE in Santa Fe wearing an enormous caricature costume of Georgia O’Keefe made of papier-mâché; in the same year, a person dressed as Pablo Picasso welcomed visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Source: The Guardian, December 28,
A statue of Adolf Hitler praying on his knees has sparked controversy after going on display in the former Warsaw ghetto.
The artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, titled Him, has been installed in the Polish capital where thousands of Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by the Nazi regime.
The statue has attracted large numbers of visitors since its installation last month, but some organisations have criticised the decision to erect it in such a sensitive area.
One Jewish advocacy group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the statue&#;s placement as &#;a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis&#; Jewish victims&#;.
&#;As far as the Jews were concerned, Hitler&#;s only &#;prayer&#; was that they be wiped off the face of the earth,&#; the group&#;s Israel director, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.
The Hitler statue is visible from a hole in a wooden gate and viewers can only see the back of the small figure praying in a courtyard.
Cattelan has not made it clear what Hitler is praying for, although organisers of the exhibition in which it features claim the statue is meant to make people reflect on the nature of evil.
Fabio Cavallucci, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, which oversaw the installation, said: &#;There is no intention from the side of the artist or the centre to insult Jewish memory.
&#;It&#;s an artwork that tries to speak about the situation of hidden evil everywhere.&#;
It is estimated that about , Jews who lived in the ghetto either died from hunger or disease or were sent to their deaths in concentration camps under the Nazi rule.
Poland&#;s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he was consulted on the installation&#;s placement but did not oppose it because it conveyed a strong moral question by provoking the audience.
He said he was reassured by the organisers who told him the statue did not aim to rehabilitate Hitler but instead show that evil A major figure in contemporary art, Maurizio Cattelan takes a brazen, humorous approach to power. He takes iconic 20th-century figures out of their contexts, depicts them very realistically and blurs how we see them by setting them in unexpected situations. A case in point is Him, a sculpture that offers the viewer a powerful theatrical and ethical experience. Approaching it from behind, the figure of a kneeling child comes into view. But walking around it, we come face-to-face with Adolf Hitler, who seems to be in the throes of a spiritual crisis. Depicting the supreme symbol of evil as a helpless child, Cattelan urges us to think about his humanity, and ultimately about humanity itself. "Hitler is everywhere. He is a ghost who haunts history; yet he is unspeakable, unreproducible, wrapped in a blanket of silence I just want this image to trigger discussion or test our psychoses," he says. One of Cattelan's signature works, Him is in the Pinault Collection. It has been on display in the collection's Venetian museums as well as outside their walls several times.Him