Page from The 11th Commandment
Maurizio Cattelan
Italian, born 1960
2024
A printed sheet from Maurizio Cattelan’s illustrated book that pairs interview text with a meticulously rendered image of a gleaming gold toilet—reproduced through offset printing with a hand‑painted gouache and ink intervention—to stage a dialogue between language and spectacle.
What strikes you is the shock of the small, jewel‑like golden toilet—its mirror‑bright surface catching the warm wood paneling and tiny details like the toilet‑paper roll—set beneath the cool, formal blocks of interview text.
By compressing an interview and the image of his notorious gilded toilet onto a single page, Cattelan extends his provocation about wealth, institutional spectacle, and the museum into the format of a book, making a stunt into a reproducible, discursive object.
Medium
Offset print from an illustrated book of thirty-three offset prints and one hand-painted gouache and ink on paper
Dimensions
sheet: 16 3/4 × 12 13/16" (42.6 × 32.5 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Monroe Wheeler Fund
Accession
226.2025.30
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
