TOILETPAPER is an artist's magazine created by Maurizio Cattelan — the Italian conceptual artist best known for taping a banana to a gallery wall and selling it for $120,000 — and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. Launched in 2010, the magazine contains no text whatsoever. Each issue is a sequence of surreal, hyper-saturated photographs that look like advertisements from a parallel universe where consumer culture has gone beautifully, hilariously insane.
A woman bites into a bar of soap. A hand reaches out of a toilet holding flowers. A couple kisses while covered in spaghetti. The images are meticulously produced, absurdly funny, and impossible to categorise — somewhere between pop art, fashion photography, and a fever dream directed by a Surrealist with access to a commercial studio budget. The aesthetic has been so widely imitated in advertising and fashion that it is easy to forget it originated here, in a magazine that treats every page as both a punchline and a provocation.
From the magazine, Cattelan and Ferrari have built an entire visual empire: wallpaper, rugs, tablecloths, wrapping paper, and collaborations with brands from Maurizio's gallery shows to fashion houses. But the magazine remains the source — a biannual object that proves art does not have to be solemn to be serious, and that the most memorable images are often the ones that make you laugh before they make you think.
Explore TOILETPAPER at <a href="https://www.toiletpapermagazine.org/" target="\_blank">toiletpapermagazine.org