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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate signed by the artist.
With its elegant Z-shaped slashes, Cattelan's Untitled (Zorro) very much resembles the Attese of Lucio Fontana, those momentous symbols of the breakthroughs brought about by Italian conceptual artists. The monochrome canvas has been calculatedly cut in a manner that deliberately evokes the artist's own presence and action. However, Cattelan has used these slashes to mimic playfully the sign that Zorro, the dashing Robin Hood of the California of old, would deftly cut into the clothes of his victims. Taking the work of one of the most esteemed Italian artists of the Twentieth Century and mocking it by combining it with this slightly kitsch element from modern culture, Cattelan reveals his striking ability to subvert and disrupt the viewer's conceptions and preconceptions about art itself. He makes explicit reference both to high and to low art, melding them together and tripping the viewer.
Untitled (Zorro) shows Cattelan's remarkably cavalier ability to puncture some of the grandeur of the art world and its intellectual posturing. His often disrespectful techniques for creating art and questioning its boundaries, for instance stealing another artist's entire exhibition and displaying it under the title Another Fucking Readymade, have led to his being compared to renegade characters such as Zorro. Untitled (Zorro) is therefore a deceptive work, an assault on the canon of Italian art and a signature marking Cattelan's own dangerous vigilante presence on the contemporary art scene.
With its elegant Z-shaped slashes, Cattelan's Untitled (Zorro) very much resembles the Attese of Lucio Fontana, those momentous symbols of the breakthroughs brought about by Italian conceptual artists. The monochrome canvas has been calculatedly cut in a manner that deliberately evokes the artist's own presence and action. However, Cattelan has used these slashes to mimic playfully the sign that Zorro, the dashing Robin Hood of the California of old, would deftly cut into the clothes of his victims. Taking the work of one of the most esteemed Italian artists of the Twentieth Century and mocking it by combining it with this slightly kitsch element from modern culture, Cattelan reveals his striking ability to subvert and disrupt the viewer's conceptions and preconceptions about art itself. He makes explicit reference both to high and to low art, melding them together and tripping the viewer.
Untitled (Zorro) shows Cattelan's remarkably cavalier ability to puncture some of the grandeur of the art world and its intellectual posturing. His often disrespectful techniques for creating art and questioning its boundaries, for instance stealing another artist's entire exhibition and displaying it under the title Another Fucking Readymade, have led to his being compared to renegade characters such as Zorro. Untitled (Zorro) is therefore a deceptive work, an assault on the canon of Italian art and a signature marking Cattelan's own dangerous vigilante presence on the contemporary art scene.