Maurizio Cattelan & Lucio Fontana @ Gagosian, Davies Street


I am a huge fan of Maurizio Cattelan. His clever, witty, tongue-in-cheek works of art always grab my attention and his Toilet Paper Magazine is possibly my favourite magazine currently in print, so when I heard about his show with Lucio Fontana at Gagosian I just had to take a look.

The exhibition puts one work each from Cattelan and Fontana into dialogue with one another. A large, cotton candy coloured egg is displayed high up on the walls at one end of the gallery. This piece by Fontana has large slashes in it and serves as a point of focus for Cattelan’s piece. Cattelan has contributed to the exhibition with the kneeling figure of Hitler. The interaction between the two is completely bizarre. I shared a smile with the security guard as I walked between the two works as it does not seem to make sense – it is absurd, it probably should offend, but it doesn’t.

From behind, Hitler could be a young boy, mesmerised by the pink egg. He looks like he is praying to some kind of shrine and seems to be poking fun at something, though I have not figured out what.

The show is certainly different, and may not be for everyone but it is certainly memorable.

La fine de Dio: Maurizio Cattelan and Lucio Fontana is on display at Gagosian, Davies Street until 5 April

Posted by

Lizzy Vartanian Collier aka Gallery Girl is a writer and curator based in London. Her work has been featured in publications including Dazed, Hyperallergic and Vogue Arabia. She was curator of Perpetual Movement during AWAN Festival 2018 and in 2019 had a residency at the Lab at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan. She has also worked with Armenia Art Fair for its inaugural edition and previously worked as an editor at I.B.Tauris Publishers. In 2019 she co-founded Arsheef, Yemen’s first contemporary art gallery. She has given workshops at Manara Culture in Amman, Jordan and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK. As of 2020 she is currently in law school, with the ambition of greater understanding the intersection between art and the law.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s