Maurizio Cattelan’s gold rest room America first captured public consideration when it was put in on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the place greater than 100,000 guests lined as much as {photograph} and even use it throughout the artist’s main 2009 exhibition. The 18-karat stable gold rest room made headlines once more when it was stolen in a daring in a single day raid from Cattelan’s present at Blenheim Palace—proving, because the Mona Lisa as soon as did, that theft could make a piece much more iconic by thrusting it into the general public eye. The heist of the high-value object, insured for £4.8 million, brought on structural injury and flooding on the UNESCO World Heritage website.
Now Sotheby’s has introduced that an version of Cattelan’s infamous post-Duchamp rest room will hit the podium this November, following its preview on the public sale home’s new venue within the Breuer Constructing. Sotheby’s describes this version as the one one in existence, for the reason that stolen piece was by no means recovered and is presumed to have been melted down for its 98 kilograms of gold. The beginning bid will likely be pegged to the paintings’s weight in gold, fluctuating with market costs till the hammer falls. Provided in Sotheby’s The Now & Up to date Night Public sale on November 18, the beginning bid as of October 31, 2025, is roughly $10 million, based mostly on its 101.2-kilogram weight.
A up to date provocateur who has repeatedly shaken the artwork world, Cattelan builds on Dadaist and Duchampian traditions fused with Warholian pop critique, questioning—each philosophically and theoretically—what defines a murals.
A century after Duchamp introduced a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” to the Society of Impartial Artists, Cattelan as soon as once more jolted the artwork world together with his gleaming gold rest room. “After we look again now at Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, it’s clearly a radical image: a altering of the guard, a profound artwork historic second. Nonetheless, Cattelan takes that many steps additional,” David Galperin, Sotheby’s Head of Up to date Artwork in New York, instructed Observer. If Duchamp took the bathroom out of the bizarre by placing it on a pedestal, signing it and calling it artwork, he says, Cattelan makes the bizarre extraordinary by rendering it in stable gold and making it totally purposeful. “There’s an uncanny surrealism right here to the imagery, and a return to type from Duchamp’s authentic gesture, which I consider is basically highly effective.”
In Sotheby’s lot description, America is in comparison with the important precision of Constantin Brancusi’s Hen in Area (1928) and the reflective attract of Jeff Koons’s Bunny (1986)—remodeling probably the most banal object into one gleaming with new significance and materials price. The work continues Cattelan’s conceptual exploration of inventive manufacturing and the mechanisms by which worth is ascribed.
All through his profession, Cattelan has challenged how inventive worth is constructed—first symbolic, then aesthetic and at last financial. By pushing the notion of the ready-made to its restrict and elevating probably the most bizarre or discarded objects, he reveals how artwork’s worth finally is dependent upon social consensus amongst gatekeepers and audiences alike.
Drawing on Arthur Danto’s argument that artwork is outlined not by its bodily type however by its “artworld” context—as “autonomous but socially decided,” as Theodor Adorno additionally famous—Cattelan’s artwork thrives throughout the financial system of self-exposure and performativity that defines digital capitalism. His work finds new which means amid the shifting dynamics of how artwork circulates and is consumed. Seamlessly navigating each the artwork market and media virality, as demonstrated by his Comic (2019)—the banana duct-taped to a wall (version of three) first introduced at Artwork Basel Miami for $120,000 and later fetching $6.24 million at Sotheby’s final November—Cattelan exposes how social media and prosumer tradition have profoundly altered these energy buildings.
Galperin calls the piece “Cattelan’s tour de pressure” within the press launch. “Holding each a proverbial and literal mirror to the artwork world, the work confronts probably the most uncomfortable questions on artwork, and the idea methods held sacred to the establishments of the market and the museum,” he says, noting how, in his grandest Duchampian gesture, Cattelan unravels a century of artwork historical past whereas reimagining its future—together with his signature fearlessness, conceptual acuity and biting humor.
Cattelan’s public sale document stays $17,189,000 for Him (2001), a wax and human-hair sculpture of Hitler in a swimsuit offered at Christie’s New York on Might 8, 2016. That document, nonetheless, might quickly be damaged. In an period of worldwide uncertainty, gold costs proceed to rise, with a 3 p.c year-over-year enhance in demand in Q3 2025 to 1,313 metric tons—the very best quarterly whole on document, in response to the World Gold Council. This makes Maurizio Cattelan’s rest room an much more engaging funding: a doubly safe asset that shops worth each within the “model” of probably the most recognizable artists of our time and within the valuable materials of the work itself. Regardless of the ultimate hammer worth, one factor is definite: as soon as once more, the Italian artist will dominate headlines at this November’s auctions.
