Felix is the skeleton of a giant cat. The name Felix comes from the famous cartoon Felix the Cat. Invited to create a work for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the artist visited the city and its Museum of Natural History, where he encountered Sue, a ginormous skeleton of a dinosaur. In response to Sue, Cattelan created Felix. In this work it’s not the cat that becomes enormous, but it’s the viewer that is shrunk and made into a little mouse. We are scared in front of Felix; Cattelan wants us to feel threatened by something that normally is lovely and cuddly.

Not of Afraid of Love is a ghost of an elephant, or maybe an elephant dressed like a ghost, like for Halloween. Cattelan uses the elephant as a cartoon, a character of a Disney animation. It’s impossible for the elephant to hide under a sheet. It’s a ghost, but a very visible ghost. So in front of this creature, we laugh, we are not afraid of it. And when we are not afraid we are able to love—not afraid of love.

Italy plays a big role in Maurizio Cattelan’s work. He is of course Italian, but Italy is something different, it’s kind of a fantasy land for him. A work like Novecento, a horse hanging from the ceiling, is a quotation from a famous movie by Bernardo Bertolucci, which bears the same name of the work (1990 in English). It’s a long saga of Italy between World War I and World War II. The horse becomes a symbol of a country hanging in a state of suspension, going up, and pulled down by the force of gravity. Italy: a country always in between the sky and the earth, always present in the imagination of the entire world, and always grounded in the doldrums of its own problems.

Cattelan flips the idea of the trophy. Usually in the house of the hunter, his or her trophy shows only the head of the animal. In this case, Cattelan shows only the body of the animal: the horse. The horse is a heroic figure, a heroic character, always present in the course of our art history, seen in the work of Velázquez, Gainsborough, Degas, David, and many others. Cattelan transforms this heroic presence into something more humble: a hero in crisis. He also got inspiration for this kind of work from Curzio Malaparte’s novel Kaputt, where the main character remembers horses stuck in the ice near the Gulf of Finland during World War II, with only their heads sticking out. Heroes trapped in the ocean. Cattelan sees himself as a hero, trapped in the ocean of the art world.

Here we see something very familiar: a banana. A banana taped on a wall. It’s clearly a joke. But can a joke become a masterpiece of art history? Maurizio Cattelan seems to believe so. Like Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1917, flipped a normal urinal and transformed it into the first sculpture of conceptual art, Cattelan takes a universal fruit, sticks it on the wall, and transforms it into an icon of contemporary art. Today this banana is known in the entire world. People play with it, people make fun of it, but nevertheless it has become an instantly recognizable image in the mind of those who pay attention to art, and contemporary art in particular. The title is special: Comedian. Who is a comedian? A comedian is not an actor; a comedian is a figure in between an actor and a regular person. A comedian stands on a stage with an invisible thin line between him or herself and the public. The comedian mirrors the public; the comedian mirrors the people from the street. Just a step farther and the comedian fails. With his banana attached to the wall, Cattelan creates this little invisible line. If he crosses it, he could fail as an artist. If he doesn't, he succeeds. All of Maurizio Cattelan’s artistic language and philosophy is rooted in this tension between failure and success.

A big mural with a puppet-like Picasso in front of it. Cattelan created work from a performance he staged in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, a museum that holds a vast collection of Picasso works. Picasso never visited America, and yet he became a sort of mythical figure. Cattelan as usual, takes the myth and transforms it into some kind of cartoonish figure, like those performers dressed like Mickey Mouse or Pluto or Goofy at Disney World. Picasso becomes an entertainer. From a great master, Cattelan transforms the artist into a street artist, an entertainer, a jokester.

You look around the space, you look around the entrance of the exhibition, and what you see are many, many birds: pigeons. This image was taken from a very famous movie by English film director Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds. In the movie, the birds transform from harmless animals into a threatening presence, seemingly like these birds, in this exhibition. Cattelan has in the past given different titles to his birds. Sometimes they were Tourists, sometimes they were called Ghosts, and in this case they are called Kids. Tourists, ghosts, and kids are all indefinable presences. They cluster together, they are noisy, they are silent, and in some form or shape, they are always menacing. Inside the space we feel an eerie sensation of menace—the menace of the birds.

Cattelan thinks of himself, sometimes, as a little Robin Hood of the art world, someone that subverts the order of the art world, and helps the poor viewer to feel more at ease, more at home. One work is a simple red canvas with a cut in the shape of the letter Z. Zorro was a TV series that Cattelan used to see on Italian television when he was a little kid. It is the story of a nobleman, who at night puts on a costume and mask and goes out to save the poor from the aggression of powerful policemen or dictators. Zorro goes, accomplishes tasks, saves the poor, brings justice, and before leaving, he marks the space with a Z. Cattelan uses the Z to save the art world from the power and maybe the impositions of one of his peers, Lucio Fontana, the artist who became famous for his slashed canvases. But at the same time Cattelan praises Fontana like he praises Zorro, because Fontana, with his slashes, freed painting from the constrictions of its tradition. He opened up spaces that were unthinkable in the canvas. So Fontana becomes the Zorro of modern art.

A horse with a pole stuck in its belly. A dead horse. A sign on top of the pole: “INRI.” The image was taken by Cattelan from a British tabloid. Animal rights protesters stuck a pole in a dead horse to protest against scientific experiments on live animals. Cattelan brings the level of the protest farther up, bringing his own tradition to the table: his Catholic upbringing. The pole becomes the cross where Christ was crucified. Written on top of the cross were the letters I-N-R-I (“Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum,” meaning “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”).

Father is a mural where two huge feet become like sculptures on Easter Island. The feet are the feet of the artist. The title Father reveals his complex relationship with his own father, a father that was at the same time absent and dead while still living.
There is also another image which comes to mind when looking at Father. It’s the image of the body of Che Guevara, the guerilla leader that was killed in the jungle of Bolivia, and paraded in front of journalists after his death. His feet—bare—were the most prominent feature of his body, like in this work, by Maurizio Cattelan.

Bidibidobidiboo: this phrase comes from Cinderella. One of the fairies, once she performs her magic, pronounces this phrase, “bidibidobidiboo.” But Cattelan attaches this magic to something tragic. What we see is a corner of a kitchen, most probably the kitchen where young Cattelan grew up having breakfast, dinner, and lunches. A little yellow Formica table, a sink with dirty dishes, a boiler for hot water attached on the wall, a chair—and on the chair, not a young Cattelan but a dead squirrel. A squirrel that committed suicide. On the floor we see a little gun. Cattelan, like Walt Disney, takes a little animal and transforms it into a character from a story, in this case a character from a tragedy. Death becomes the central issue of this work. Despair, failure for a life that doesn’t have any perspective; this is one of Cattelan’s key early works, first presented in London in a small gallery in 1996.

Self-portrait and death: We, a bed, two people lying on the bed, completely dressed in suits, black suits. And these two people are no one but the artist himself. Cattelan got inspiration from a picture that he saw of Gilbert and George, the two British artists, always very elegant, well dressed with tailored suits, who were lying in bed. He took this picture, and he created—as usual—a twist. He transformed two different people into one person, twins or the same person, mirroring himself. It’s an eerie image. The two people are looking up but at the same time, they look dead. The viewer can choose, is this a joke, is this a funeral monument?

A grave. We are in front of a grave. Next to the grave, the earth dug out to create the space for the body. This work was first presented in a museum in France, Le Consortium in Dijon. Cattelan refers to the horrible practice of German Nazis in World War II forcing prisoners to dig their own graves. To dig your grave is to create the space for the end of your life.

A hole in the ground, a figure, a self-portrait popping out from it. This work was first presented at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands. The artist apparently dug a tunnel under the museum to appear in one of the rooms of the museum, most likely with the intention of stealing a painting. The idea probably arrived from a famous movie by Italian director Mario Monicelli, I soliti ignoti, where an awkward group of small-time thieves, in an attempt to reach the safe of a pawn shop, make a mistake and make a hole in the wall of a kitchen of an apartment. The self-portrait sneaking out from the ground has this kind of surprise in his eyes, almost like he is in awe of the space that has appeared over his head.

Many of the works by Maurizio Cattelan speak about one subject, and one subject only: himself. Self-portrait after self-portrait, Maurizio Cattelan explores his own identity in order to explore the identity of each of us. Spermini is one of the first works that represents the artist’s features. The title refers to human sperm, the drops that contain the acorn of a human being. Cattelan takes a little drop of this fluid and transforms it into little self-portraits, little masks, attached on the wall in a cloud that forms the army of potential, fertile subjects.

A self-portrait can be also created with other mediums. Catttelan, the neon sign, is a self-portrait. In the spelling of the name there is a mistake, maybe something that the artist wanted to do. The t’s are not two, but three. But the three t’s become three crosses, and again Cattelan brings back his Catholic upbringing through the symbolic image of a crucifixion: three crosses on top of the mountain; in the center, the one of Christ and on the side, those of the thieves.

Maurizio Cattelan shrinks and enlarges his subjects. It is not a question of scale, but it is a question of perception. He shrinks the feeling, the emotion, the fear, the happiness… In Mini-Me, Cattelan shrunk himself into the shape of a little doll that sits on a shelf, looking down into the space below. Mini-Me looks in a sort of jaded despair at the people, the viewers passing under him. He doesn’t ask for help, he is giving up.

Another work where the scale is changed is the two small elevators—perfectly functioning, opening and closing their doors—on the wall. We don’t know if we see a building from afar, if we see a building of little people, little animals, mice... We are projected by the artist into a different world. We became like in the novel Gulliver’s Travels: giants, or little midgets.

The first work that Maurizio Cattelan created for the Venice Biennale, in 1993, was not a work. Invited by the curator to the prestigious event for the first time, Cattelan was at a loss. He wasn’t able to deal with the space, he wasn’t able to come up with an idea or a work. He came up, as many times he has done in his career, with a trick. He decided to sell the space allocated by the curator to a perfume company who would have use of the space to advertise a new product. The title of this work is Working is a bad job. For Cattelan, work has always been a struggle—until he found art. And, through art he created his own job, where work was not bad, but was a pleasure.

The final work of this exhibition is the work that gives its title to the entire show. It is a room inside which we can enjoy, from very close, the Sistine Chapel—an experience that is not possible in reality. When you enter the real Sistine Chapel, you are dwarfed by the fresco by Michelangelo. But when you enter Cattelan’s Sistine Chapel, the frescoes are dwarfed by your presence. “The Last Judgment” is like a huge puzzle in front of the eye of the viewer. Cattelan once changes our relationship with art. He makes it more familiar, more playful, more interesting, more enticing, and even, exciting.