Gallery 01:16

THE SQUARE

With this room, Maurizio Cattelan wants to create a kind of square in the exhibition, a place that celebrates art and being together without limits and barriers. It is a room without hierarchies. The walls are hung with paintings that are usually mounted on pull-out wire screens in the museum’s depository. In storage, aesthetic and ideological principles for how art is presented are put aside for practical considerations, such as available space. The works here are installed in the same way as in storage.

Moderna Museet’s mission is to collect, preserve, exhibit and share all forms of modern and contemporary art. This means having to make many choices. The collection consists of some 130,000 works, including 6,000 paintings. By presenting a random selection, displaying works that are normally not shown, Cattelan challenges the power that the museum exerts through its choices.

In the middle of the room stands a full-sized copy of Cattelan’s monumental sculpture L.O.V.E. (2010). The original in Carrara marble on a travertine plinth can be found outside the stock exchange in Milan. A tension arises between the glorious monumentalism and the charged symbolic content. What at first glance is taken for an offensive gesture, however, soon proves to be a mutilated greeting. By breaking off the fingers, the hand raised in a fascist salutation is transformed into something else. Cattelan points at the voices and gestures that are heard and seen, and the ones that are not, and how ideologies and politics govern how we experience the nature of the world.