In 1987, in an exhibition called Fauna, he pretended that he had stumbled across the hidden archives of a German zoologist called Dr Peter Ameisenhaufen, which contained samples of animals previously unknown to science.

Ten years later, he convinced the world that a Russian cosmonaut had been lost in space in 1967, and the disappearance covered up.

The hoax fooled Spanish TV, which reported it as fact before realizing that the cosmonaut’s name, Ivan Istochnikov, was a Russian translation of the artist’s own name.

It starts with taxidermy, including a squirrel with a snake’s tail and a winged goat; moves on to photographs of “constellations” that are actually specks of dust on a car windscreen; and ends with pictures of the artist himself performing “miracles”, such as levitation, in the garb of a Christian monk.

The mermaid is my personal favorite, though the baboon centaur earns an honorable mention, to be sure.

Photographer Joan Fontcuberta via CNN World.