Art World Prankster Maurizio Cattelan Takes on Systems of Power in a New Show

Celebrated as one of the art world’s best loved provocateurs, Maurizio Cattelan has been invited to stage his playful work alongside artworks from the Modern Museet in Stockholm’s collection for group show titled “The Third Hand.” The Italian artist has chosen to use each new room of the exhibition to create a surprising and original exploration of the role of “power” in society.

Certainly, over the decades, Cattelan’s innately irreverent approach has often taken aim at systems of power and the various visual devices we use to convey importance or authority. Never shying from controversy, the artist has used his work to topple dictators, ridiculed religious figures, and lain bare our more absurd pretensions.

Cattelan once said, “power, whatever power, has an expiration date, just like milk.” In other words, it is a shifting category ripe for artistic interrogation. He has chosen to pair his own work with those by artists like Eva Aeppli, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Cecilia Edefalk, Lena Svedberg, Rosemarie Trockel and the editorial staff of the underground magazine .

“Maurizio Cattelan’s practice is rooted in conceptual art, asking questions about and of our reality,” said the museum’s director Gitte Ørskou. “As a curator and founder of art magazines, he has been in constant dialogue with art. His critical and insightful view of our collection gives art back its power.”

Though vast scale has often been used as a tactic to convey authority, some buildings are so impressive its hard to take them in. Cattelan has usefully produced a miniature replica of the Sistine Chapel with (2018) so that we can finally zoom in on the details of Michelangelo’s legendary frescoes. Can power sometimes get in the way of utility? Can imitation add something new to an artwork?

What are the chances that such a God-ordained holy man as a Pope would be struck down by a meteorite? In Cattelan’s farcical universe, they are apparently quite high. It turns out that the protections conferred by enjoying high status on earth don’t really amount to much in outer space. Here, Pope John Paul II takes the hit.

Inspired by the novel by Malaparte, based on his experiences on the eastern front during WWII, this work recreates a scene in which a herd of ill-fated horses—unsung victims of a pointless war— attempted to escape a fire but froze while swimming across Lake Ladoga in Finland. The writer describes an eerie scene of their heads forever trapped in ice with eyes frozen open. Undaunted by morbidity, Cattelan offers us the opposite view.

In a more recent work, we are left to speculate whether a marble-sculpted man and dog lying side by side are peacefully dreaming on a hearth rug or, perhaps, dead. The lifelike figures make it all too easy to imagine their chests slowly rising, even as they are clearly made of stone. Though dogs are loyal pets to humans, here two species meet on equal terms and there is no obvious power imbalance.

One of Cattelan’s most immediately disturbing works is a statue of a suited Hitler kneeling as though he is a school boy attending to his prayers. It is a jarring position in which to see the notorious historical figure, who once wielded the power to bring about acts of evil on a mass scale. At the Moderna Museet he kneels before Roy Lichtenstein’s , a finger pointing out of the small picture frame seems to convert the scene into one of recrimination.

The museum also contains a full-sized replica of Cattelan’s 36-foot monument (2010-), a vast marble hand that has several of its fingers severed so that it appears to be giving us the finger. If this were not the case, it could be interpreted as instead making a fascist salute. The artist has said that he intends the piece to be a critique of the totalitarianism that swept across Europe in the first half of the 20th century.