ToiletPaper Magazine N°20

published in May 2024
no text
22.5 x 29 cm (paperback)
40 pages (ill.)

ToiletAlex PaperPrager is the new edition of Toilet Paper magazine, born from a collaboration with the American artist, photographer, and filmmaker Alex Prager: a vibrant dialogue in which the ironic style of Toilet Paper meets the dark humor of Alex Prager, a parade of images that are at once familiar and strange, suggesting a timeless world located somewhere between dream and reality.

ToiletAlex PaperPrager is a magazine born from the collaboration between the provocative world of Toilet Paper and the cinematic aesthetic of Alex Prager. It brings together twenty-four images, twelve from each universe, blending vivid colors, unsettling stagings, humor, and references to everyday life, on the boundary between reality and fiction. This publication follows in the footsteps of ToiletMartin PaperParr, which in 2018 paired the work of Martin Parr with the duo Cattelan-Ferrari.

Alex Prager is an American photographer and filmmaker born in 1979 in Los Angeles. Her work is distinguished by highly colorful, theatrical, and emotionally charged images that blend humor and strangeness. Inspired by Hollywood cinema, pop culture, art-house film, and street photography, she creates stagings that sit on the boundary between fiction and reality. Her work is widely published in the international press and included in the permanent collections of major museums such as the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Moderna Museet.

The design

The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan enjoys mockery and provoking controversy by creating works intended to challenge the public. Self-taught, he began his career in the late 1980s. His works, which take shape from objects and people in the real world, are the result of an irreverent operation against art and its institutions. Cattelan opened his own New York gallery, the Wrong Gallery, a space where nothing is sold and which remains permanently closed. Cattelan creates works that always cause a scandal and give rise to all sorts of interpretations, even questioning religion and the sacred, such as La Nona Ora, a life-sized wax effigy of the late Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite. His sculpture "LOVE," on display in Milan's Piazza Affari since 2010, provokes the local residents and challenges the history of this financial square with a simple gesture (an upraised middle finger).
In January 2012, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a 21-year retrospective of his work entitled "Maurizio Cattelan: All." In June 2010, he launched the biannual magazine Toiletpaper with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, featuring images full of humor and fantasy. Toiletpaper is now a brand that translates its kitsch imagery into decorative objects and a clothing line.