In the world of art, certain alliances transcend mere professional collaboration, entering a territory where complicity and shared vision lead to outcomes that defy expectation. Like the legendary pairings of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Bob Fosse and Liza Minnelli, the association between maverick artist Maurizio Cattelan and curator and museum director Chiara Parisi, embodies that rare creative alchemy that continuously pushes boundaries.

Their first encounter is shrouded in a halo of mystery. The artist retains an image of ‘an apparition: a figure dressed in white, graceful and smiling, in the middle of the Villa Medici garden, during the mid-1990s.’ In Parisi’s mind, this first meeting takes a different shape: ‘It was in the 1990s, in Milan, at the opening of an exhibition that wasn’t his. People were already talking about him, and the atmosphere was tense. Then Maurizio arrived, with a strange, almost disarming confidence that only deeply empathetic people possess.’

The fragments of memories combine like a fascinating puzzle. ‘The first time I really spoke to him was in Rome. I imagined him like Raphael, with unreadable hands,’ she continues. ‘He was looking for a swimming pool, towel already around his neck. I thought, he must be an optimist.’ Next followed a prescient image: ‘One evening, I was with Gabriel Orozco in my Renault 4, driving from the Trinità dei Monti to the Aventine Hill. Maurizio was already there. He seemed withdrawn and slightly on guard. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the people or the ruins. He seemed innocent, and I thought, one day, his works will have to protect him.’

Parisi’s journey through the museum landscape began in 2004, when she assumed directorship of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de Vassivière, located in the Limousin region in central France. Then in 2011, she established herself as a major figure on the French cultural scene when she took charge of programming at the Monnaie de Paris, breathing new energy into a setting laden with five centuries of history. One need only recall the radical audacity of Paul McCarthy’s ‘Chocolate Factory’, in 2014, with the monumental sculpture Tree, installed in Place Vendôme at the same time – a project that will go down in history. Cattelan, on the other hand, distinguished himself through an atypical and autodidactic career that stands in stark contrast to the classic trajectories of the art world. His international renown was cemented in the 1990s/2000s with key works, such as La Nona Ora (1999), depicting Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, or Him (2001), the figure of Hitler kneeling in prayer.

Their encounter was the beginning of a great adventure. Neither could have imagined that in 2017, Parisi would invite Cattelan to the Monnaie de Paris for what was to be a landmark exhibition in his career: ‘Not Afraid of Love’. The artist had formally announced his retirement in 2011 with his retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which saw the entirety of his works suspended from the ceiling of the rotunda, in a vertiginous metaphor for a permanently free-floating art world. The show in Paris marked his unexpected return to a museum.

‘Working with Maurizio is like dancing a tango, based on the imbalance of the center of gravity: Slowly, you find the right balance between trust and unpredictability. We looked for a common language through endless conversations, irony, and a sincere willingness to listen,’ Parisi confides.

Since 2019, she has been the director of Centre Pompidou-Metz and she regularly invites Cattelan there. ‘We got each other right away: her with her volcanic energy, me with my ability to stay one step behind, but always with one foot ready to stumble on something. We had long phone calls somewhere between brainstorming and therapy sessions: a continuous flow of ideas, doubts, enlightenments, and confessions. We used our skills as out-of-tune instruments, trying to play a harmonic dissonance that would work in the chaos,’ the artist explains.

In 2024, their complicity found an unexpected avenue of expression. The Vatican entrusted Parisi, in collaboration with Bruno Racine, director of Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, with the artistic direction of its pavilion for the Venice Biennale, housed in the former Santa Maddalena delle Convertite chapel on Giudecca, now a women’s prison. Without hesitation, she invited Cattelan to exhibit Father (2021), a giant photograph of his feet. A work that engages with reflections on transcendence, it was pasted on the chapel’s façade. ‘I approached this project with the awareness that we were working on fragile and very powerful ground. We chose to walk on the edge, avoiding certainty and leaving room for doubt. It was also a personal challenge: to understand how a place so laden with history could open itself to a more open, more human narrative,’ she recalls.

Their latest proposition, ‘Dimanche Sans Fin. Maurizio Cattelan et la Collection du Centre Pompidou’, scheduled to run until February 2, 2027 at Centre Pompidou-Metz, promises to push the boundaries of the museum experience further still. In celebration of the institution’s 15th anniversary, the exhibition brings together more than 400 works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in dialogue with Cattelan’s most famous works. The presentation, structured as an ABC, offers 26 thematic sections. It features Cattelan’s iconic L.O.V.E. (2010), a monumental sculpture of a hand with all digits cut off, except for the middle finger standing proud, Felix (2001), a giant cat skeleton, and the infamous banana taped to the wall, Comedian (2019). These are in conversation with historical works such as Sonia Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier (1913) and André Breton’s Studio Wall, presented for the first time outside Paris.

‘I wanted an exhibition that could not be rushed through, that became an experience to be inhabited. I wanted an exhibition that makes you fall in love, without easy answers and with lots of open questions,’ Parisi suggests. Cattelan, for his part, insists on the intimate dimension of the project: ‘I would like it to leave something “on” each person who visits it – like sand after a day at the beach – annoying, but a reminder that you have been in a place where time stood still. I would like that after visiting the exhibition, those who leave feel a little “suspended”, like on those Sunday afternoons when nothing happens, yet you feel that everything could change.’

The duo’s ambition extends beyond exhibitions. Their project ‘School without Roof or Walls’ at Centre Pompidou-Metz, conceived as an experimental educational laboratory, demonstrates their desire to rethink the way art is taught. Launched for the 2024–25 academic year, the school boast its first graduates with Cattelan as an exceptional mentor, as it brings together middle school students studying subjects as diverse as aesthetics, biology, poetics, and metaphysics. Yet for the artist, school was ‘an endless torture, and Sunday was the day when I could finally breathe.’ When asked about the reasons for establishing a school in a museum, Parisi explains: ‘Learning should never be separated from living. The museum is not a temple, it is a living organism. And the school is its pulse. Putting a school inside a museum means rejecting the idea that culture is something to be contemplated in silence. It is a political and poetic gesture at the same time: to give back to new generations the space of imagination, amid art, where everything can still be thought about for the first time.’

Observing the full scope of their projects, one understands the dynamic that animates this unique double act. Parisi and Cattelan, equipped with an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, don’t hesitate to shake up institutional frameworks. Recognized as free spirits, they also demonstrate a profound understanding of cultural mechanisms. ‘Museums are places of preservation and silence, but we believe that museums should not be mausoleums, where only the memory of what once was is commemorated. We prefer to think of the museum as a space where memory and life are intertwined, where the present constantly reactivates the past. Art is a way to disturb the water’s surface when it is too calm and only reflects the sky,’ they conclude in unison.