Maurizio Cattelan. Night

Since the early 1990s, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960 in Padua) has been one of the defining voices in international art. His work begins with images that seem known, even fixed, and shifts them just enough to unsettle their meaning. In doing so, it touches on subjects often regarded as difficult or set apart—religion, childhood, authority, and generational collective trauma. Across Cattelan's artistic practice, gestures that move between irony, exaggeration, and restraint engage established figures and forms, opening them to renewed consideration. Questions of memory, authorship, and belief emerge through the encounter with the works. With ›Night‹, Maurizio Cattelan returns to Berlin, where he co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale twenty years ago.

The exhibition includes seminal pieces such as ›Him‹ (2001), ›Novecento‹ (1997), ›La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi‹ (2000), and ›Untitled‹ (2003), inspired by Günter Grass’s ›The Tin Drum‹, alongside new commissions. Together, these works trace recurring concerns within Cattelan’s practice: the tension between innocence and violence, the construction of identity, and the uneasy persistence of historical memory.

At its centre is a new site-specific work conceived for the Neue Nationalgalerie. This commission initiates a far-reaching intervention into the museum’s spatial framework. Through a careful transformation, the exhibition reshapes how the building is used and experienced. Familiar modes of display give way to an environment defined by gathering, reflection, and attention. Within this setting, the relationship between viewer, work, and architecture shifts.

The Neue Nationalgalerie, with its architecture by Mies van der Rohe, provides a setting in which these questions gain particular clarity. The building itself becomes part of the exhibition, shaping how the works are seen and experienced.

Presented in Berlin, ›Night‹ unfolds within a German context shaped by layered histories and ongoing processes of remembrance. As narratives continue to be revisited across generations, Cattelan’s work enters a field in which images, symbols, and forms of representation remain actively negotiated.

›Maurizio Cattelan. Night‹  is curated by Lisa Botti, curator at Neue Nationalgalerie, with Klaus Biesenbach, director of Neue Nationalgalerie, in close collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan.

The Preis der Nationalgalerie, founded by the Freunde der Nationalgalerie (Friends of the National Gallery) in 2000, has established itself over the past 25 years as one of Germany’s most significant awards for contemporary art, recognising artists who have gone on to make a lasting impact on the national and inter-national art landscape.