Maurizio Cattelan’s legendary gold toilet, America, sold to a famous American brand for $12.1m - the second highest price for the artist at auction.
The toilet, America, by Maurizio Cattelan went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby's in New York. The starting bid for the 101-kilogram 18-karat-gold work was $10 million.
America has a long history, one of only two fabricated examples of the edition of three plus two artist proofs, the work debuted in a functioning bathroom at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. The second version of the work, exhibited at Blenheim Palace in 2019, was stolen in an infamous smash-and-grab and has never been recovered—leaving the auctionned example as the only extant version.
David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, called the toilet “among Cattelan’s most iconic and influential works,” adding that it “perfectly encapsulates the artist’s career-long interest in value, absurdity, and institutional critique.”
Main Image: Maurizio Cattelan, America, 2016 Sotheby's