On the occasion of the second edition of the “Giornate del Contemporaneo – Italian Contemporary Art” (7-12 October 2019), the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal, Chromatic and the Galerie Blanc are pleased to present the exhibition “Toilet Paper Magazine: the disruptive image of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari“. Inaugurated on the 11th May 2019, the exhibition will be open to the public until the 31st of December 2019.
October 1st to December 31st 2019
Galerie Blanc
1115 rue Ste-Catherine East, Montreal
Free admission
The Galerie Blanc is a new idea of exhibition space, all outdoors and at the mercy of all weather conditions. Accessible day and night, the mission of the Galerie Blanc is to facilitate the daily encounter between contemporary art and the public. In this space 41 photographs from the periodical “Toilet Paper Magazine”, founded in 2010 by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, are exhibited, and placed like advertising posters, without any caption, as deliberately declared by the authors themselves: “We think that any retrofit work of a precise explication appears ultimately less disruptive! Our images instead must always produce a different reaction in each single visitor, especially a feeling generated by the diversity of the culture”.
Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua in 1960. He is a leading artist who emerged in the early nineties. Heir of the Italian satirical spirit and in the great Duchampian tradition, the artist does not cease to draw on the source of reality, a reality considered in itself provocative. In an iconoclastic and subversive spirit, Maurizio Cattelan’s work compares the hardships and fractures of society with the mechanisms of fiction, proposing new horizons of freedom. Factional (?) and provocateur, Maurizio Cattelan is the “black sheep” of contemporary art, always representing the grain of sand in the well oiled machinery of contemporary art.
Pierpaolo Ferrari is a photographer, born and raised in Milan. It is in this city, famous for modern art, that his interest in photography takes shape. Ferrari takes his first professional steps in the world of advertising, working first with the agencies BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi and, starting in 1994, for giants like Nike, Campari, SONY, Heineken, MTV and car manufacturers like Mercedes Benz, Audi and BMW. In 2006, with Federico Pope, he created the cultural magazine “Le Dicteur”, which highlights the photographs of artists from around the world. Today, among other professional activities, Pierpaolo portrays Hollywood actresses and directors covering the covers of “L’Uomo VOGUE and” W Magazine” and directs the printed advertisements of Armani and Kenzo. In 2010 he created” Toilet Paper Magazine “in collaboration with the artist Maurizio Cattelan.
The festival “Giornate del Contemporaneo – Italian Contemporary Art”, organized this year for the second time, in conjunction with the “Contemporary Day” held in Italy since 2005 by AMACI and MIBACT, it aims to promote the artistic heritage abroad contemporary Italian, expressed with the different languages of painting, sculpture, video, installations, photography, design, etc., as part of the integrated promotion mission of the Country System.