Maurizio Cattelan will present his first major solo museum exhibition in Germany at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie this fall. The comprehensive survey will pair some of the irreverent Italian artist’s best-known works with new site-specific commissions.
“Maurizio Cattelan. NIGHT” will open September 10th during Berlin Art Week and will be on view through March 7, 2027.
The exhibition coincides with Cattelan’s selection as the winner of the 2026 edition of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, one of Germany’s leading contemporary art prizes. The exhibition will bring together landmark works spanning more than three decades of the artist’s career—including Him (2001), Novecento (1997), La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), and Untitled (2003)—alongside newly commissioned works created specifically for the modernist glass-and-steel museum designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
A new site-specific commission will be at the center of the Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition and will intervene in the spatial framework of the museum’s architecture, reshaping how visitors move through and experience the landmark building.
Born in Padua in 1960, Cattelan has built a career around provocative sculptures and installations that fuse dark humor with political and historical critique. Since emerging in the early 1990s, he has repeatedly challenged ideas of authority, religion, memory, and authorship through works that have become some of the most recognizable—and controversial—in contemporary art. His practice includes Comedian (2019), the banana duct-taped to a wall that became a global cultural phenomenon, as well as sculptures of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite, Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer, and a miniature version of himself hanging from a coat rack.
Presented in Berlin, “NIGHT” places many of those longstanding concerns within a German historical context. According to the museum, the exhibition will examine questions of collective memory and representation.
“As a German born, living abroad for most of my adult life, Maurizio Cattelan’s work always had a very German reading for me,” Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach said in a statement, citing works including Him and Untitled. “Now we will be able to experience and see Cattelan’s work in Berlin.”
Curated by Lisa Botti in collaboration with Biesenbach and the artist, the exhibition inaugurates a new chapter for the Preis der Nationalgalerie, which, after 25 years, is shifting to a single-artist exhibition format in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s expansive upper-level hall.
