Maurizio Cattelan
Born in Padova, 1960 and lives in New YorK, USA
A self-taught artist, Maurizio Cattelan began his career designing furniture but turned to conceptual art in the early 1990s and quickly garnered a reputation for a sense of humour and for blurring the distinction between art and reality.
He described himself as a lazy artist. Some of his actions backed up the latter claim. In 1992, for example, he assembled a group of donors to award him a $10,000 grant that stipulated that he not exhibit any artwork for one year. At the 1993 Venice Biennale by subletting his exhibit space to a perfume company.
The artist “retired” in 2011 after his Guggenheim retrospective but continues to work on projects like Toilet Paper Magazine, which he founded. In 2013 he curated a show in Turin, titled Shit n Die, during the Artissima week.
