Maurizio Cattelan: Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Whitechapel Gallery - review
A self-portrait by Maurizio Cattelan looks over the Whitechapel’s collections gallery. It’s a small but near lifelike waxwork with an oversized head, wearing a felt suit. He hangs from a clothes hook, seemingly the victim of a schoolboy prank, and the look in his eye is somewhere between shame and mischief.
The suit refers to the attire of Joseph Beuys, the shamanistic German artist for whom felt signified “spiritual or evolutionary warmth”. He had a profound belief in art’s social power but for Cattelan it appears to be the opposite — impotently dangling there, he cocks a snook at Beuys, but also casts himself as a pathetic figure.
Like the other works here, all drawn from a Turinese private collection, it is an amusing, arresting image whose significance slowly evolves. Even in the apparently whimsical Bidibidobidiboo (1996), a taxidermised red squirrel slumped over a formica table with a gun at his feet, there is substance — he has linked the table to his memories of his childhood and wants us to kneel down to see the tiny work, as if we were praying before a relic.
Religion is among the subjects closest to his heart. Though his installation of Pope John Paul III struck by a meteorite is not here, a neon misspells his name “Catttelan” so that the three Ts at the heart of the word evoke the crosses of the Crucifixion.
When he addresses his native country, taking on Left-wing terrorism, the Mafia and Berlusconi’s corrupt first administration of the Nineties, he is at his most caustic. The label for a processed cheese called Il Bel Paese (the beautiful country), picturing a romanticised view of Italy and its surrounding waters and islands, is blown up into a carpet over which hangs a polyurethane hand giving a middle-finger salute.
Cattelan is famed as a provocateur in his homeland, not unlike Damien Hirst here, but much of the work in this show needs the Italian context to properly resonate.
Nonetheless, this is a good introduction both to a major figure and to a significant collection.
Until December 2 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)
