HIM, 2001

Maurizio Cattelan

Narrator: When you approach the sculpture HIM, you do so from behind. It is only when we come level with the boy wearing school clothes from the 1930s that it suddenly becomes clear to us that he has the face of Adolf Hitler. The contrast between the petit body in prayer position and the face of the man who, according to the artist himself, has become synonymous with “evil incarnate” is striking.

Maurizio Cattelan struggled with the work and had to fight against his reflexes to destroy the wax figure. In an interview from the same year the work was created, he said the following about it: “I wanted to destroy it myself. I changed my mind a thousand times, every day. Hitler is pure fear; it’s an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory, it lives in my head, even if it remains taboo. Hitler is everywhere, haunting the spectre of history; and yet he is unmentionable, irreproducible, wrapped in a blanket of silence. I’m not trying to offend anyone. I don’t want to raise a new conflict or create some publicity; I would just like that image to become a territory for negotiation or a test for our psychoses.”