User:C.lehner25/Maurizio Cattelan

Early Life and Education
Maurizio Cattelan did not begin his working life as an artist. His first working occupation was a student gardener, and then he was a trinket-seller at his nearby church, and then he was a laundryman, and then he helped in nursing at the mortuary. He was fired from all four of these jobs because of his bad behavior. Art seemed to be the only job where such behavior was allowed and even encouraged. He had invariably been a nobody, jokester, and troublemaker, even when he was an adolescent and all of that would translate into his art later in life. He is an informally trained artist who saturates his sculptures and paintings with with satire and hilarity in an effort to flip the definition of art on its head, and to make people laugh.

Art practice
Maurizio Cattelan began his career in art in 1989 with a portrait of himself called Lessico Familiare, when the art movement Transavanguardia (which was a reaction to conceptual art that returned the practice of painting as well expressions of feelings like happiness to artworks) was at its height in his country. Cattelan has stated in an interview that he does not think that he himself is a conceptual artist, that he does not like to be categorized, and that he has "never started being an artist," which could be the reason that thinking about quitting in his career isn't hard for him to consider. He is always doubting his decisions and the actions that come from those decisions, which enables him to take himself without a lot of seriousness and to create hilarious, satirical artworks like Comedian and America. Many of his artworks were done in the late 1990s, which was predominately taxidermy artwork that, according to Francesco Bonami, is perceived as cartoonish, but in a relatable way; some of those taxidermy artworks are even meant to represent the artist, such as the ass (the animal, not any particular human) who was assigned to fetch some academic degree that is actually supposed to be the artist's own from 2004. In this particular artwork, the artist is referring to how he got a college degree despite perceiving himself as an idiot, which the donkey has been stereotyped as throughout history (i.e. the donkey in the movie Shrek). Cattelan's art attempts to redefine the art movement by adding in something conceptual artworks lacked before he came into the picture: humor. His art is full of practical jokes and outlandish, provocative stunts, which was his way of ripping on and providing a window for society in general. Even though he now spends more of his time as a curator, Cattelan has not retired from being an artist quite yet.