Vatican Pavilion at Venice Biennale to Feature Maurizio Cattelan

The Vatican has announced Conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan as among the artists appearing in its pavilion at the SixtiethVenice Biennale, slated to take place April 20–November 24. Cattelan made headlines in 2019 with hisComedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall; that same year, his 2016 workAmerica, a fully functional solid gold toilet, was swiped from England’s Blenheim Palace. The artist is an interesting choice for the Holy See, as his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale—La Nona Ora, 1999—was a life-size resin figure of Pope John Paul II sprawled on the floor under the crushing weight of a meteorite.

“Sometimes questions that we can at first judge as radical are ways of reconstructing the vision of the sacred, and this is part of the Church’s encounter with the artistic world,” said Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, in a statement, referring to Cattelan’s inclusion in its entry. The pavilion is being curated by Chiara Parisi, director of France’s Centre Pompidou-Metz, and Bruno Racine, ex-president of the French National Library.

Cattelan is tasked with creating a large-scale work for the façade of the pavilion, which will occupy a historic women’s prison on the island of Giudecca. Other artists participating in the Vatican’s group show include Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, and Claire Tabouret. Some of the roughly eighty women who remain incarcerated on the island will participate in the exhibition, in a move meant to reflect Pope Francis’s embrace of dialogue, solidarity, and fraternity. Inmates will variously guide visitors through the exhibition, contribute poems and photographs to installations, and act in a short film directed by Zoe Saldaña and Marco Perego. Francis is scheduled to visit the Biennale this year, becoming the first pope to do so.