Self portrait by Maurizio Cattelan
Offset lithograph on card
7 x 6 in. (17.8 x 15.2 cm)

Maurizio Cattelan, Italy's most successful contemporary artist, is probably best known for his satirical and conversational sculptures suspended between reality and fiction, the characters and personas which inhabit Cattelan's world are ghostly appearances in a personal theatre of the absurd. The Italian's work stimulates and subverts the rules of culture and society often combining sculpture and performance in works which has provoked and challenged the limits of contemporary value systems through the use of irony and humour.

An inveterate prankster, Maurizio is probably best known to audiences for his photorealist sculpture of the Pope struck down by a meteorite, he has also produced sculptures of Hitler in prayer and exhibited the rubble from terrorist bombings. For other works he sellotaped one gallerist to the wall of his white cube, got another to wear a pink penis costume for six weeks and once persuaded a curator to dress up for the sake of art in a pink bunny suit.

Cattelan was once named as the world's most influential artist. He did not attend art school but taught himself whilst doing many odd jobs, including one at a mortuary, which some credit for his macabre taste. However, Vanessa Beecroft claims that she had an affair with Cattelan before either became famous and that in fact she was the source for many of his ideas.

Cattelan has exhibited in some of the world's most important museums such as MOMA, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work is held in many public and private collections including Guggenheim Museum, New York, Foundation Pinault, Paris and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.

Maurizio Cattelan teases the artworld without falling into the naïve trap of thinking he can subvert a system of which he is a part.