In the documentary feature MAURIZIO CATTELAN: BE RIGHT BACK, filmmaker Maura Axelrod depicts Maurizio Cattelan’s disruptive and indelible career as the pre-eminent art-world prankster of our time.
The docu is based on interviews with curators, collectors, art-world luminaries, and ex-girlfriends on what makes this most compelling of conceptual visionaries tick.
Unfolding as a mystery, the feature depicts a perplexing man, who, from his professional inception, ushered viewers into a dazzling hall of mirrors that enchants to this day.
Maurizio Cattelan shook up the contemporary art world beginning in the late 1980s with a series of action-based installations including his first solo show in Milan, Torno Subito (Be Right Back), in which he padlocked an empty gallery – barring entrance to critics and spectators – and simply hung a sign on the door that read “Torno Subito” or “Be Right Back.”
Over his twenty year career, Maurizio continued to provoke and inspire, culminating in an encompassing installation and his retirement in 2011. His final exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City featured all of his works to date suspended – execution style, as sharper critics described it – from the ceiling of the world-famous museum’s rotunda, encapsulating a brief but intriguing career that Cattelan himself terminated at the height of his success.
Running time: 90 Minutes
