Maurizio Cattelan: NIGHT

Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026 at Neue Nationalgalerie presents NIGHT, the first major solo exhibition in Germany by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960 in Padua). The exhibition brings together seminal works from across Cattelan’s practice with new commissions conceived specifically for Mies van der Rohe’s iconic building. With the new work Purgatory (2026), the exhibition introduces a scaled-down Brandenburg Gate inside the museum, repositioning one of Germany’s most recognizable monuments as a space of passage, reflection, and historical ambiguity. From this point, the exhibition unfolds as a sequence of encounters between bodies, objects, images, and architectural forms.

At the centre of the exhibition, Him (2001), Cattelan’s kneeling male figure, is positioned in direct relation to Dawn (2007), a female figure crucified inside a transport crate. Their alignment establishes a vertical axis within the space, bringing together distinct forms of devotion, vulnerability, and sacrifice. High overhead, thousands of taxidermied pigeons form People (2026), introducing a diffuse presence that quietly transforms the museum’s ceiling structure and evokes a place of collective gathering and observation. Other seminal works include Novecento (1997), La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), and Never (2003), inspired by Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Together with further new commissions, these works engage recurring concerns in Cattelan’s practice: history, power, memory, identity, and belief. Familiar images and figures are shifted just enough to unsettle their meaning, moving between irony, ambiguity, vulnerability, and the uncanny.

The spatial configuration of NIGHT temporarily lends the Neue Nationalgalerie the character of a church. Bodies gather beneath the building’s vast roof, while figures are elevated into positions of contemplation and sacrifice. The architecture becomes more than a setting: its scale, symmetry, silence, and distance from everyday life acquire a ritualistic quality.

“As a church, the building gives shape to something invisible. The Neue Nationalgalerie already has something ritualistic: its scale, symmetry, silence and distance from everyday life. I was interested in taking that quality seriously, but without making it religious. I imagined the space almost like a contemporary church: a central nave, side aisles and a sequence of presences,” says Maurizio Cattelan.

The title NIGHT refers to a condition of altered perception. Things are not necessarily seen less clearly, but differently. Night suspends certainty: familiar forms become harder to define, while overlooked details may come into focus. In this sense, the exhibition explores not darkness itself, but the temporary loss of certainty and the possibility of seeing otherwise. Presented in Berlin, NIGHT unfolds within a context shaped by layered histories and ongoing processes of remembrance. Cattelan’s return to the city—twenty years after he co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale—brings his works into dialogue with a place where questions of history, political identity, and collective memory remain particularly charged.

NIGHT is curated by Lisa Botti and Klaus Biesenbach, in close collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan.

The Preis der Nationalgalerie, founded by FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie in 2000, enters a new phase in 2026 with its presentation at the Neue Nationalgalerie. The exhibition is made possible by FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie and supported by BMW.