Art by Maurizio Cattelan

Cattelan never went to art school. He worked as a furniture designer, a morgue attendant, and reportedly a gardener before turning to art in his late twenties, which may explain why so little of his work looks like it came out of a studio tradition. He's best known for a small number of images that escaped the art world entirely and became internet-famous on their own terms: a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall, titled Comedian, which sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami in 2019 and was, within days, eaten off the wall by a performance artist named David Datuna, who called it his own performance piece. A later edition of the same banana sold at auction in 2024 for $6.2 million.

America, a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet, was installed at the Guggenheim in 2016 for visitors to actually use, genuine plumbing, hour-long lines. When it was later loaned to Blenheim Palace in England, thieves ripped it out of the wall and made off with it in under five minutes; it's never been recovered and was almost certainly melted down for scrap gold worth well over a million dollars.

Underneath the stunts is a consistent, fairly bleak sense of humor about authority: a wax Pope struck down by a meteorite, a taxidermied horse suspended by its stomach through a gallery wall, a kneeling child-sized Hitler. In 2026, he won Germany's Preis der Nationalgalerie and opened his first major solo show in the country, at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie.