Maurizio Cattelan: Bones

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Gagosian is pleased to announce Bones, an exhibition of new works by Maurizio Cattelan, opening at the Davies Street gallery on April 8, 2025. 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.