- Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s latest installation, “Sunday,” is on view at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City.
- The work of art is a 17-foot-tall, 68-foot-wide wall made of 64 stainless steel sheets plated with 24-karat gold and scarred by 20,000 bullets.
- Visitors have described the piece as a shocking critique of American gun culture, but Cattelan argues the satire can be applied to any part of the developed world.
Upon arriving at the gallery housing artist Maurizio Cattelan’s latest satirical work, you’re immediately struck by its brilliance: the vibrant glow of 64 panels coated in 24-karat gold that make up a glittering wall measuring 17 feet high and 68 feet wide.
The second is a trail of holes in the gold surface made by more than 20,000 bullets fired from six different weapons.
But the third impression is perhaps the most striking: Look closely and you’ll see your own golden reflection, and if you take a selfie, as many viewers have done in the last month, you’ll see yourself riddled with bullet holes.
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American wealth and luxury permeated with the pain of gun violence: that’s the description most visitors will get from Cattelan’s solo exhibition, the first in more than 20 years by the conceptual artist known for a series of similarly eyebrow-raising works, including a simple banana duct-taped to a wall that made waves at Art Basel in Miami (it attracted so much attention that it had to be removed), a working gold toilet (which was eventually stolen), and a statue of the Pope being toppled by a meteorite.
But when I ask Cattelan himself to define his new work, titled “Sunday,” the 63-year-old Italian steadfastly refuses to blame America. “I can’t be that specific,” he said in an interview, standing next to the work. “It could be about anywhere in the world, actually.” Asked to criticize the reviews, he mischievously replied, “I believe in diversity. I don’t care what they say.”
Gagosian Museum says the Cattelan show is one of its most successful exhibitions ever, attracting 14,000 visitors so far, with most viewers saying their main emotion was contradiction, confused by the juxtaposition of beauty and violence and not knowing how to feel.
A marble fountain by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, set in front of a giant, bullet-pierced, gold-plated wall, as part of the artist’s “Sunday” visual installation at the Gagosian Gallery in New York on May 23, 2024. The fountain depicts a man leaning forward and urinating. (AP Photo/Jocelyn Noveck)
“It’s beautiful, but there’s also a violence underneath it all. It’s interesting because you don’t know how to react to it,” said Brent Koskimaki, a recent visitor from Calgary, Canada. “The piece was pretty violent, you know? But now it’s so quiet and calm.”
And he’s right that the work is uniquely violent: The artist oversaw a shooting session at a Brooklyn gun range, where professional marksmen fired two semi-automatic pistols, two semi-automatic rifles, and two 12-gauge shotguns. The 64 panels are made in Italy from gilded stainless steel, are three millimeters thick, and weigh more than 80 pounds.
Cattelan points out that this shooting session couldn’t have happened in Italy. “Some of these weapons are only used by the military,” he says. Still, he was surprised by how ethical and professional the gun experts he met in the U.S. were. “They weren’t fanatics at all,” he says.
Adding to the contradictions is a Carrara marble fountain that Cattelan set against a porous wall: Modeled after a deceased friend, it features a man curled up on a bench urinating, with water coming out of, well, the obvious place.
Veronique Braque, a friend of Mr Koskimaki and his wife, Teresa, pointed out that the man’s sad depiction was in stark contrast to the beautiful brilliance of the wall.
“To me it’s a beautiful, inviting wall,” says Black, from Montreal, “so I want to get up close, I want to touch it. But when I see a man urinating, I’m kind of disgusted. So I’m drawn to the violent and I’m drawn away from the human. We should be helping each other, but I’m drawn to the money.”
Tereza Koskimaki adds: “Maybe that’s just how society is. We are drawn to beautiful things, but at the same time we turn a blind eye to what is happening in society and to the suffering of others.”
Cattelan says the idea evolved over time, and at one point he envisioned splitting the gallery in two, with a transparent, bulletproof wall with shooters on one side and visitors on the other. Luckily, that never came to fruition. At another point he envisioned using just one gold panel. But at Gagosian, “the space called for something bolder. We went from one panel to 64.”
Because this is a gallery, some (but not all) of the panels are for sale, and while Gagosian wouldn’t disclose prices, it says that about a third of the panels have been sold, bringing a reported $375,000 each.
That’s likely to be significantly more expensive than a similar bullet-holed panel by another artist, Anthony James, on display elsewhere in Manhattan. The gallery confirmed that James’ lawyers had written to Gagosian seeking details about how Cattelan came up with the idea. Cattelan said through the gallery that the copycat allegations were “baseless.” This is not the first time the artist has faced such accusations; a Miami federal court previously ruled in James’ favor over claims involving his famous bananas.
Cattelan has been called many things — the shock artist, the bad boy of contemporary art — and is difficult and elusive. But on a recent morning, smiling and sipping a glass of tea, the artist seemed as affable as can be. “Do I seem difficult?” he asks, grinning.
When asked about the “shock artist” moniker, Gagosian senior director Andy Avigni countered, “I think he’s a very sensitive artist. The symbols he uses are shocking. They’re not necessarily his symbols, but symbols that exist in society.”
Avini said “Sunday” is a sequel to Cattelan’s 2016 “America,” a fully functioning toilet bowl cast from 18-karat gold installed in the Guggenheim Museum’s restrooms that realized “the American dream of opportunity for all.”
Unfortunately, perhaps some thieves took that literally and took the opportunity to steal a toilet from Blenheim Palace in England, where it was later rented out. The toilet has never been recovered. (Because the toilet was connected to plumbing, the theft caused extensive damage to the 18th-century house.)
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Either way, Avini said the current show takes the idea behind the toilet “a step further into a discussion about violence and wealth — specifically gun violence” and, more specifically, the accessibility of guns.
Cattelan doesn’t go into detail here, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in other interpretations: When Mark Follino, an art lover visiting from Boston, introduced himself and offered his own take on a long-standing divide in American society, Cattelan listened intently and called out to the gallery staff.
“Take notes!” he instructed.
