Maurizio Cattelan: Beware of Yourself

“Beware of Yourself” gathers the thoughts of Maurizio Cattelan, who reflects on his work, exhibitions, collaborative projects, and recurring concepts in his art, creating a kind of unpredictable “mental map” where each element becomes an opportunity to question reality, overturn conventions, and explore identity and power systems. The texts in the book take shape from the artist’s words, drawn from over three hundred interviews conducted over more than thirty-five years with multiple interlocutors—often conveyed through the voices of friends, collaborators, or ghostwriters—deconstructed and reassembled in an unprecedented form for this publication. Tracing nearly forty years of artistic research, from early experiments in the late 1980s up to 2025, the publication defies any traditional definition or editorial category: somewhere between a catalogue raisonné, monograph, autobiography, personal diary, and sourcebook, it offers for the first time a portrait narrated exclusively in the first person.