Berlin has waited a long time for this. Maurizio Cattelan. NIGHT, which opened at the Neue Nationalgalerie on 10 September and runs to 7 March 2027, is the Italian artist’s first major solo exhibition in Germany. It is also the 2026 edition of the Preis der Nationalgalerie – the country’s most prestigious contemporary art prize, awarded since 2000 and now staged, in a new format, inside Mies van der Rohe’s glass hall. The opening fell mid-Berlin Art Week, with the doors open until ten in the evening.
Through the little Gate
Visitors enter through Purgatory (2026), a new commission: a scaled-down wooden Brandenburg Gate standing inside the museum. One of Germany’s most recognisable monuments becomes a threshold to walk around and through – a space of passage, reflection and historical ambiguity, as the museum puts it. It is a characteristic Cattelan move: take an image everyone thinks they have finished reading, shrink it, move it indoors, and watch the meaning come loose.
Beyond the gate the great hall has been arranged, in the press release’s striking phrase, with the character of a contemporary church. At its centre runs a vertical axis between two figures. Below, Him (2001): a small kneeling man in prayer, instantly recognisable to anyone who knows the work as the artist’s child-sized Hitler, asking – what? Forgiveness? Above, Dawn (2007): a female figure in a white institutional outfit, suspended in cruciform posture inside a transport crate, her hands pierced. The piece originally referred to a Francesca Woodman photograph; here, pinned by packing-crate battens, it reads as restraint device and martyrdom at once.
The congregation
Overhead, thousands of taxidermied pigeons – People, first shown in Venice in 1997 and renewed here as a 2026 iteration – settle across the ceiling structure, turning the hall into a place of collective gathering and quiet observation. On the roof sits Never (2003), the animatronic boy who periodically jerks awake to beat a drum: an unmistakable nod to Günter Grass’s Tin Drum, the child who refuses adulthood while history marches past.
Around the floor: Bones (2025), a white marble imperial eagle crashed to earth; All (2007), nine veiled marble bodies laid out like downed soldiers, quoting the veiled Christ of Naples without its virtuosity; and, tucked away in the cloakroom, the miniature of the artist himself in a Beuys felt suit – La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000) – hanging inert from a coat hook, a danger to nobody. There is even Dust (2026), an ordinary fire extinguisher containing the cremated remains of one of Cattelan’s friends. Mortality is everywhere in this show, mostly whispering.
Why Berlin, why now
Cattelan, born in Padua in 1960, returns to a city where he co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale twenty years ago. The museum frames NIGHT as an exhibition about altered perception: at night things are not seen less clearly but differently, and familiar forms become harder to define. Presented in Berlin – a city where history, political identity and collective memory are permanently under negotiation – the proposition sharpens. The title’s wall text ventures that day must follow night. After the last few years in European politics, that reads less like comfort and more like a dare.
For the general public Cattelan remains the banana man: Comedian, the duct-taped banana, sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2024 for $6.2 million to crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun – who then ate it at a Hong Kong press conference. There was also the solid-gold toilet America, and the small praying figure Him. “To me, Comedian was not a joke,” Cattelan told The Art Newspaper in 2021; “it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value.” NIGHT is the strongest evidence he has offered in years that he means it. The jokes are all present. None of them stops where it started.
Practical notes: Potsdamer Straße 50; closed Mondays; late opening Thursdays to 8 pm. Seven months is generous. Do not wait seven months.
