• Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento,1997, taxidermy horse, metal frame, leather slings, rope Collection Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin; Gift Amici Sostenitori del Castello di Rivoli.
  Installation view at the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Photograph: Ben Symons.
  

Maurizio Cattelan has been creating startling, disturbing and controversial artworks since the early 1990s. His sculptures, installations and interventions encourage the viewer to experience doubt as a primary response to contemporary life. At times a joker, Cattelan is known for his dark sense of humour. Novecento, one of his most renowned works, is an unusual still life – a taxidermic horse suspended from the ceiling by leather slings. The horse’s legs are strangely elongated, as if gravity had stretched them downwards. This work makes reference to the 1976 film 1900 (pronounced Novecento in Italian) in which director Bernardo Bertolucci explores Italy’s painful passage to modernity. As in the film, which presents fascism and communism in opposition, Cattelan expresses a sense of blocked energy. A saddled horse is a means of transportation and mobility; here it is rendered immobile. His work is a eulogy for the end of the great revolutionary impulses that characterised the twentieth century.

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