Maurizio Cattelan: Not Afraid of Love

On January 8, the exhibition by Maurizio Cattelan Not Afraid of Love at Monnaie de Paris will end—the most important project of the artist alongside with his retrospective in 2011 at the Guggenheim of New York. It marked the artist’s great come back and has already entered history.

Conceived as “a very controlled alternation of disturbing or disagreeable artworks and pleasant or lovingly crazy pieces,” this exhibition is accompanied by a publication realised with the Guggenheim.

Thus, Chiara Parisi closes, with this popular and critical success, the cycle she initiated five years ago as Head of the Direction of Cultural Programs of Monnaie de Paris.

Maurizio Cattelan had described his exhibition as post-requiem, perhaps with the will to get rid of his “prankster” image. It has now been achieved at the Monnaie de Paris. With Not Afraid of Love, Cattelan engages with us, questions ourselves, childhood, death, religion, authority, family, humor…

“For some curators, exhibitions are like playing chess… But here, at Monnaie de Paris, that was not the case: I found out with Chiara that my works might slightly change meaning as soon as they’re side by side, possibly opening up a totally new set of meanings.

“At the Guggenheim, I choose a display with every piece that I produced. Good or bad, it didn’t matter at all. It was a Last Judgment without any Judge. Today, at Monnaie de Paris, I hope there will be time and quietness enough to allow anyone to go deeper into works’ aspects that have rarely been taken in consideration until now.”
–Maurizio Cattelan

The end of the exhibition is celebrated by the publication of all the Pros & Cons texts, conceived in the first place as the cartels of each artwork in the exhibition.

This project which has debated Maurizio Cattelan’s work, under the passionate impulse of Donatien Grau and Chiara Parisi, involved a myriad of figures coming from the French and international intellectual and cultural life: Carlo Antonelli, Goga Ashkenazi, Audrey Azoulay, Fabien Baron, Karol Beffa, Gérard Berréby, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Bernard Blistène, Christian Boltanski, Francesco Bonami, Caroline Bourgeois, Father Michel Brière, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Monique Canto-Sperber, Charlotte Casiraghi, Maurizio Cattelan, Beatrice Copper-Royer, Massimo De Carlo, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, Lydia Flem, Dario Franceschini, Massimiliano Gioni, Nicolas Godin, Vittorio Grigolo, Inez & Vinoodh, Jonas Jacquelin, Christian Lacroix, Jack Lang, Laurent Le Bon, Thomas Lenthal, Bernard-Henry Lévy, Jean de Loisy, Marie Rose Moro, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Benjamin Pech, Nora Philippe, Olivier Py, Élisabeth Quin, Bruno Racine, Guy Savoy, Camille de Toledo, Oliviero Toscani, Augustin Trapenard, Tasha de Vasconcelos, Brother Olivier-Thomas Venard, Philippe Vergne and Olivier Zahm.