Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. Upon the occasion of his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, All, Cattelan astonished the art world by announcing his retirement from art, declaring that he would instead focus on the production of his magazine Toilet Paper. For the exhibition, Cattelan hung his entire oeuvre-128 works-from the middle of the Guggenheim's rotunda, in a sensational gesture of both witty irreverence and summary completion. Maurizio Has Left the Building is the artist's documentation of this landmark exhibition. Composed of several unbound signatures of installation photographs by Cattelan's Toilet Paper collaborator Pierpaolo Ferrari, plus drawings by Matteo Nuti, art direction by Sebastiano Mastroeni and text by Caroline Corbetta, this oversize volume conveys the extraordinary multidimensionality of Cattelan's installation. Ferrari's full-color photographs show both individual works in close-up and larger overviews in which Frank Lloyd Wright's famous modernist rotunda becomes visually implicated in Cattelan's decidedly un-modernist swansong gesture, inspiring in the viewer a mixture of awe and amusement. As such, Maurizio Has Left the Building offers the definitive account of one of the most memorable exhibitions in recent history.
