The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, born in Padua in 1960, has lived and worked in New York since 1993. He has provoked, affronted, satirized and held a mirror up to the art world with his objects since the end of the 1980s. Cattelan’s provocations are also founded on the major topics of people and the reality of our lives: the failure of individuals, death, sexuality, politics, economy – and the perversions, with which these topics present themselves time and again as well as our ridiculous efforts to deal with them.

In 2010, Maurizio Cattelan launched a completely new work: the magazine “Toiletpaper”. In this magazine, which is published completely without text in the regular magazine market, Cattelan shows a world of pictures that come from the Internet from all areas of the media and are distilled into new pictures about the major topics.

Maurizio Cattelan has created a new issue of his magazine “Toiletpaper” for the Ringier Annual Report 2011, which he is dedicating to Ringier. The pictures developed for this issue are again résumés of information from the excess of pictures in the Internet, which present attractiveness, seduction and provocation as a constructive irritation and consequently make the excess of pictures into a topic of discussion too. The information of the actual Annual Report will be supplied as a toilet paper roll together with the magazine in line with the magazine title and polemically caricaturing the transitoriness of all information. “Reactions to this are likely to prove somewhat mixed,” Michael Ringier commented grinning about the provocative form of his annual award. “Maurizio Cattelan puts us to the test with this work.”

Michael Ringier knows the work of Cattelan. In November 2011, Maurizio Cattelan installed a major retrospective of his works in the New York Guggenheim Museum. He hung 129 works like a mobile from the cupola of the museum down into the empty rotunda. This exhibition also impressed the publisher Michael Ringier. “Cattelan simply turned the museum inside out. Instead of looking inwards towards the walls, the visitor now looks into what was previously empty space. As a result, he effectively reinvented a building that is more than 50 years old. And it is for precisely that reason that we can take him as our role model, because we also have a similar task. We have to reinvent a company that will soon be 180 years old. And I am confident that we will succeed with our own openness, which we are now demonstrating with respect to our Annual Report.”

The Ringier Annual Report is available in German, English and French. You can download or order it from the Ringier company website www.ringier.com.

Ringier Corporate Communications