Raise your hand who has heard the name of Maurizio Cattelan... certainly almost everyone. Probably the greatest Italian contemporary artist, but just a few know his story.
Every story is a journey, and the best feeling during his journey comes when taking the initial steps that reveal the possibilities to come. In a wonderful interview for Vanity Fair about his life, the artist born in the city of Padova talked about his family, his adolescence, and about all the jobs he took before being able to live from his artwork. A road full of choices, relationships, oppositions and good luck; but in the end, all of these things together reveal what we all are, because talent is just enough if it is well directed and polished. Otherwise it is just vainglory. If art is a representation of life, then it is precisely from life where we must begin.
And so, Maurizio Cattelan’s story begins. Not in New York, or at any of the other cities where his works are on show nowadays.
Maurizio Cattelan and Dilmos: The start of everything.
It is a story that starts in a small province, Forli and then the arrival to Milan during a special year, 1989. The year of the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the ‘80s, a fresh start with many doors and possibilities looking towards the future and the ghosts of the past. For almost a decade in Milan, Dilmos has been a point of reference in the design world as an exhibition space, exhibiting emblematic modern design objects but also furniture that expresses the spirit of the ‘80s. Yet Dilmos represents much more: the courage of producing exhibitions by unknown artists. It is in the artists that the seal of Dilmos' research is imprinted and is precisely the reason that Cattelan will choose to sleep for a whole year within the walls of this exhibition space, sleeping every night in a different bed. Each night, choosing a different area to explore, a different source of inspiration.
The year 1989 was the year that sparked Cattelan’s relationship with Dilmos, marked by the Individual Media exhibition in which Cattelan first exhibited his wonderfully mythical Cerberino table, now sold exclusively in the Dilmos Edizioni collection.
Here's what growing up means: becoming aware... of yourself, of the journey and of the world.
A world to live life, becoming art.
To learn more, read Vanity Fair’s interview