‘For a long time,” says Maurizio Cattelan, “I wanted to do something with gunshots. It was my obsession.” His original idea, back in the 90s, was to have a shooter fire rounds at him as he stood behind bulletproof glass. This was to take place in front of an audience. “The idea was there,” he says. “But it was insane.”
We should not be too surprised. The controversial Italian conceptualist has made headlines in recent years by taping a banana to a wall (and selling it for a fortune), smashing a meteor into the pope (or his likeness), and plumbing a gold toilet into Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace (which was then nicked). All in the name of high art satire. Cattelan’s work is direct, confrontational, obvious and brutally in your face. And now, in a small show at Gagosian in Mayfair, he has revisited that 90s notion – and blasted huge holes into sheets of gold with a pump-action shotgun.
The new works are definitely more health and safety compliant, but still fairly shocking. Each gold panel (actually steel coated in 24-carat) has been shot using a 12-gauge shotgun, leaving cavernous, rusted gashes in the pristine mirrored surface. They are brilliant pieces of conceptual minimalism: grotesquely, abhorrently violent, ludicrously, grossly opulent.
He first started firing bullets at artworks after his exhibition at Blenheim Palace in 2019, shooting at gold and black versions of the union jack and the stars and stripes. “That was a time when nationalism was rampant, but not as bad as today. I liked the idea of using this symbol, but it was a little literal.” So he stripped away the overt symbolism, leaving behind just the gold and the gunshot wounds.
“I’d never been to a shooting range. I’d never seen weapons before. The whole experience, witnessing shooting that doesn’t involve any type of violence – I was excited.” But after the initial excitement came the realisation of what guns are for and what they do. Was he shocked when he first saw the holes a gun could make in metal? “Yeah, I mean, it is energy transforming matter. But I would have been more shocked to see it used on something living.”
While these works are relatively small, in New York last year he covered an enormous wall in gold panels, all blasted with AR-15s, the weapon of choice in countless American mass shootings. “If you do only one panel, you have an artwork. If you do something massive, you have an execution wall – something more menacing.”
In New York, the gallery bumf described the works as a comment on the scourge of American gun violence, a reflection of a society losing itself to barbarity while gorging itself on luxury. But in London, the gallery talks instead about how each work has been “modified” by gunshots as “metaphors for creation and transformation”. Gun violence has been swapped out for references to the history of Italian minimalism and nods to artists such as Lucio Fontana.
This is typical Cattelan, whose work toys with double meanings and punny juxtapositions, flirting with the boundaries between good and bad, to expose bigger truths. Here, with these blasted panels, the bigger truth is societal: we’re surrounded by violence and death, while the rich are getting richer. The works come across as attacks on gun culture and an uncaring society, and yet they’re trophy artworks, ridiculously expensive objects for the mansions of the mega-rich. Are these collectors buying them as comments on violence, or as garish gold home decor? “We can talk about gun violence,” he says. “But it’s not the main subject. I like works that are open to interpretation.”
Take Comedian, the banana he taped to a wall at a swanky art fair in 2019 and sold for $120,000, causing viral uproar in the process. It was at once a comment on the preposterousness of the art market and an object of ludicrous art market-iness. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. We just tried to see how far we could go. I could not be in an art fair as a painter, or as a commodity. I thought it was a moment to make a statement.”
Comedian exposed the staggering greed and capitalist opportunism of the art world, which uses aesthetics as an excuse for speculation and the accumulation of wealth. But the art world lapped it up. It was like watching turkeys clapping for Christmas. When it was subsequently bought at auction for $5.2m in November 2024 by crypto investor Justin Sun, who ate it live on stage, all of its unsubtle ludicrousness was laid bare. “This guy was looking for attention,” says Cattelan. “I think he did a good job.”
But leaving things so open to interpretation has its risks. I tell Cattelan about seeing his 2007 installation Ave Maria just before the pandemic. The work is a disembodied arm sieg heil-ing out of a wall, locked in a perpetual fascist salute. Its messaging might seem obvious, its anti-fascist intentions clear to any viewer. But when I saw it, a group of students were taking selfies as they gleefully sieg heil-ed back at the artwork. He grimaces. “If I could have a list of works to erase, that work would be on it. We don’t own the meaning of what we do.”
But erase it he did, in a way. “One of the hands of Ave Maria was on my desk for a long time, and one day I chopped off the fingers. This fascist salute was severed, and what was left was one finger.” So Ave Maria became Love, a huge carrara marble middle finger installed permanently in the heart of Milan’s financial district in 2010.
And now the golden toilet. At Blenheim in 2019, he installed a fully functioning, fully gold toilet, and called it America. There aren’t a lot of ways to take that. Although created in 2016 for the Guggenheim in New York, the exhibition at Blenheim happened right in the middle of Donald Trump’s first term. There was nothing implicit in the work’s messaging: this was art about excess, wealth, greed, authoritarianism, and a nation going down the pan. A few days after being installed, the golden bog was stolen. Two men have now been convicted in connection with its burglary.
But since America was nicked, things have only worsened: authoritarianism is rampant, Trump is back, the far right is flourishing. Can the work of a conceptual prankster like Cattelan do anything in the face of such a torrent of violence, inequality and discrimination? “I don’t think art has the power to oppose regimes,” he says quietly, thoughtfully. “But people have the power. People can oppose.”