For this edition, which is dedicated to the Men’s Collection S S 2015, Modem is giving “carte blanche” to famously irreverent contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan born in Padua, Italy, in 1960.

Back in the 1990s, he began to produce sculptures that surprised and astonished the public and the art scene. His multi-faceted works reflect paradoxes and alienation in society, as well as the struggle of the individual person. For Cattelan, style means nothing more than a particular artistic attitude that can be translated into different media, linguistic forms, and visual solutions.

An artist like him, who uses ironic distance as a guiding thread of his practice must rely on flexibility, but never on predictable conclusions. Cattelan’s works are part of some of the most important public and private collections
worldwide, and featured into numerous significant group exhibitions and biennials.

Critical and humorous but always profound, Cattelan reflects a variety of themes. Rather theatrical and ephemeral in his actions, objects, and installations, the artist spares no taboo in unmasking the deceitfulness of well-practiced social and art world conventions through his pictorial statements.

Cattelan’s passion / obsession for images brought him to team up with Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, in 2010, in order to found the magazine
TOILET PAPER, a bi-annual, picture-based publication. Somewhere in between softness and perversion, the issues of Toilet Paper explore basic concepts through a collection of strong images all made from scratch.

The messages conveyed by the pictures are meant to tickle the public’s visual memory, leaving open room to different narrative inventions and interpretation.
Comforting and seductive and yet corrupted and sophisticated as Cattelan’s art is, Toilet Paper showcases a surreal and provocative representation of contemporary values and morals, intriguing the readers’ mind with their
uncanny ambiguity.

The images on this edition’s cover and dividing sheets have been selected among the wide range of Toilet Paper’s images, and thereby pay a tribute to the creativity of one of today’s most-discussed artists.

For more information:
mauriziocattelan.altervista.org