New Maurizio Cattelan exhibition opens at Gagosian London, Bones, an exhibition of new works has opened at the Davies Street gallery.
On view are new pierced gold-plated panels, a sculpture comprising a Carrara marble boulder with a pair of horns, perched atop a couch, and a sculpture of a guitar-playing skeleton inside a bottle.
Cattelan’s highly provocative juxtapositions of iconoclastic imagery with symbolically charged materials elicit strong, often visceral responses—his work has been attacked, stolen, and even eaten. In Bones, the artist furthers the alignment of creation and destruction in stainless-steel panels, plated in 24-karat gold, each of which has been “modified” by one or two gunshots. These brutalized surfaces serve as metaphors for creation and transformation, the choice of large-caliber ammunition amplifying their symbolism by ensuring that each hole is a decisive mark, the trace of a singular violent event.
The new works’ formally simple arrangement recalls Conceptual art and Minimalism in its emphasis on the interaction of form and environment; here, destruction generates new spatial possibilities, the torn and punctured sheets also suggesting desecrated relics. There are echoes here, too, of William Burroughs’s shotgun paintings and Gustav Metzger’s “auto-destructive” art. Further, the works’ opulent composition in gold—a material that can be melted down and reused, giving it an unfixed nature that allows it to effectively disappear—contributes to its resonance with the troubled relationship between material wealth and the accessibility of deadly weapons.
Notre Dame (2025), an imposing sculpture situated at the entrance of the exhibition, arose from Cattelan’s desire to produce an object endowed with a mythic presence and the familiarity of history, an ancient-seeming artifact displaced to a contemporary setting. The white marble boulder, with its incongruous horns, embodies a tension between the natural and the imagined, suggesting an unknown deity in fossilized form. The bull-like appendages connote power and virility, again forging a connection to long-established ritual and prompting reconsideration of a familiar structure. Similarly, the couch on which the form rests turns a space of domestic comfort into something primal and uncanny. Collectively then, the gold panels and marble sculpture explore a raft of opposing forces: domesticity and wildness, force and resistance, creation and destruction, perseverance and loss.
Notre Dame is joined by Deaf (2025), which features a balaclava-clad skeleton casually strumming a guitar. Sealed within a glass bottle, the haunting work speaks to a sense of imprisoned memory and the absurdity of stasis. Positioned alone in a viewing room, stationed atop a tall pedestal, Deaf is a totem to a world that refuses to listen, to resistance, to poetry, and to death itself.
Maurizio Cattelan, Bones, April 8–May 24, 2025 Gagosian Davies Street
Also on view concurrently with the exhibition, Cattelan is taking over Gagosian Burlington Arcade with an exhibition of watercolors, editions, and other works. Francesco Bonami’s book Stuck: Maurizio Cattelan—The Unauthorized Autobiography, published by Gagosian, is being rereleased in a new and updated English edition in conjunction with the opening alongside Leftovers: The Bonami’s Cattelans, a new volume of his drawings also published by Gagosian.
About the artist
Maurizio Cattelan’s practice is steered by an irreverent wit and a provocative drive to reexamine cultural figures and institutions, including the art world itself. Employing diverse materials, objects, and gestures in curated exhibitions and publishing projects as well as sculptures, installations, and performances, he deconstructs our ideas of context and value, revealing their often irrational roots. MORE
Maurizio Cattelan on FAD Magazine
