Maurizio Cattelan

Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in 1996)
Christie's, London, October 24, 2005, lot 71
Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Aosta, Museo Archeologico Regionale, L'arte del gioco. Da Klee a Boetti, December 2002 - May 2003

Exh. Cat., Venice, La Biennale di Venezia, Quarantasettesima Esposizione internazionale d'Arte, 1997, n.p., illustrated in color (hares only)

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The shelf exhibits evidence of wear and handling with scattered losses to the paint. Otherwise, there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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With an extraordinary pair of taxidermic hares inexplicably stranded on a gallery shelf in compelling isolation, Riccardo cuor di leone of 1996 is a seminal expression of Maurizio Cattelan's artistic rhetoric. At once hysterical, shocking, and engrossing, this work is central to Cattelan's project of enlisting stuffed animals to act as figural metaphors. In this same year he notoriously suspended a horse in mid air with a leather harness in The Ballad of Trotsky and with Bidibibodibiboo presented a squirrel slouched over a kitchen table after apparently committing suicide with a handgun. The following year he was invited to represent Italy at the Venice Biennale and satirized the spectacle by placing taxidermic pigeons in the rafters of the pavilion for his celebrated work Tourist.

In many cultural traditions the hare symbolizes a trickster who disobeys rules and discards conventions and thus this pair readily provides a fitting metaphor for the infamously mischievous artist. The oversize convex yellow discs that serve as the eyes for these animals dramatically differentiate them from their fellow living species. Playing on the association of wide-eyed naïve innocence that has long been a defining attribute of cartoon animals, Cattelan's comic characters in fact appear somewhat hypnotized, with an almost crazed expression of hyper-alertness. Rather than accentuating the adorability of the hares, the eyes suspend them unnervingly between reality and fiction and expedite Cattelan's theater of the absurd.

Translating as 'Richard the Lionheart', the work's title takes the name of the twelfth-century warrior king of England whose fearsome military and political achievements were paid for with horrific medieval brutality and bloodshed. Cattelan's designation of this pair of helpless creatures thus strikes an absurd parody of their supposedly soft and cuddly stereotype, and continues the artist's career-long interrogation of semiotics and the associative power of labels.