Maurizio Cattelan is a self-taught artist from Padua, Italy. He began his artistic career making furniture for his apartment, but soon realised he preferred to make sculpture and performance art. Cattelan is one of the best- known Italian artists to emerge internationally in the 1990s. His work challenges contemporary art value systems through irony and humour. Influenced by the anarchism of Dada, Cattelan’s “characters” take on theatrical and absurd appearances. For example, his life-sized representation of the Pope in a prostrate position after being struck by a meteorite, La Nona Ora (the Ninth Hour) subvert the typical representations of the Pope with humour. He refuses to take an ideological stance rather concentrating on representing the complex rules of culture and society.