translated by Giorgina Arcuri

Paduan artist Maurizio Cattelan, since the beginning of his howling rise in the contemporary art system, has always managed to make a strong impression, causing the printed media and websites of every type to talk about him constantly. An emblematic case occurred on 6th May 2004, when the city of Milan woke up bewildered to one of his works installed in Piazza XXIV Maggio. Three plastic manikins, representing children hanging from the branch of a large oak tree, provoked a great emotional impact and a huge psychological stir. Other impressive works are “Nona Ora”, which portrays Pope John Paul II in a white cloth crushed to the floor by a meteorite, or a kneeling baby Hitler. All extremely beautiful works, with characters who are similar to those that appear as extras in the theatre of the absurd of Ionesco and Beckett: police officers turned upside down, stuffed animals that hang from the ceiling, icons of power publicly derided. Cattelan’s creativity simulates and subverts the rules of culture and society in a constant game of transgressions and acts of insubordination, and for this reason the Paduan artist always manages to be at the centre of artistic attention.
But recently, our most renowned artist in the world has once again hit the bull’s-eye with the exhibition inaugurated in the city of Pulheim, a village north-west to Cologne, in Germany.
The rather provocative installation, on display until 10th August, shows a woman with her back turned to the public, inside a wooden case attached to the external wall of an ex-synagogue, which expresses “the desperate fight of religion and history against the power of death”. The work is part of the Synagogue Stommeln project, an art exhibition organized since 1991 inside an ex-synagogue now turned into Sankt Martin’s Catholic church. 
It is a woman dressed in a white skirt and a large blouse. In front of her a white sheet, as if she were on her deathbed. A work that has shocked mainly those who believe that Christ died only for the male gender.  As his passion regards the whole humanity, a crucified woman is nothing but Christ in different clothes. The media proposed it as a shocking image, but actually it is not a “crucified woman ”, it does not portray any traditional iconography of the crucifixion also because the female figure is not nailed to two posts and is turned towards the wall.
Maurizio Cattelan’s new installation has been reviewed with an unanimous chorus of approval by the German press, contrarily to what has happened in Italy, country that likes to massacre those who have success. These days, art critic Vittorio Sgarbi seems to have started a campaign against Cattelan through the pages of “Il Giornale” as well as through the microphones of Radio24, claiming that the Paduan artist is a skilful communicator who exploits scandals aiming at censorship, which “helps the work of art to live and is indeed its actual reason of living”.
It is unclear why this work has caused so much shock. A brief historical excursus of the crucifixion in the world of art shows that female crucifixions belong to a long iconographic tradition ,which starts from the medieval representations of the martyr of Saint Giulia up to the performances of Marina Abramovic or the sacrificial rites of Hermann Nitsch, Viennese artist who in his actions inspired to the Passion crucified animals, men and women. Furthermore, the theme of the crucifixion is not new in Cattelan’s oeuvre. In the last months, the artist exposed at the Kunsthaus of Bregenz a sort of “self-portrait” of the photographer Francesca Woodman, the young Italo-American artist, who died suicide in the eighties at the age of twenty. The hyper-realist sculpture in resin represents Woodman’s body in a position that recalls the religious iconography of the crucifixion. Tied or nailed to the upper stile of a door at the top of a staircase. A beautiful image that expresses the tormenting intensity and the sense of death that Maurizio Cattelan intends to communicate with his art.
But the indomitable Sgarbi accuses Cattelan of not doing anything new, given that the Pac of Milan houses a painting of a crucified woman executed by the artist from Ferrara Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani.
“I have never claimed to be the first or the third” replies Maurizio Cattelan. “It is not the arrival classification, but the place that houses it that makes my work special compared to Mantovani’s crucifixion. Installing a work in a church and placing it in relation with the old synagogue of Stimmeln gives the work a completely different meaning and I accepted the invitation because it entailed this type of challenge”. “Anyhow in Stommeln everything is calm” – claims Cattelan – “And I can guarantee that on Sunday the priest and the mayor were together at the table raising their glasses, happy and satisfied. Moreover, I have also received a recognition plate by the city which I will take to my home in New York”.