Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie opens its doors Thursday to "Night," the first major solo exhibition in Germany for Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian artist known for duct-taping a banana to a wall and sculpting a meteor-struck pope. The show runs through March 7, 2027, inside Mies van der Rohe's glass-and-steel pavilion — itself one of the most recognizable museum buildings in Europe.
Cattelan was named winner of the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie, an award given annually by an international jury that comes bundled with a solo show at the museum. According to the Neue Nationalgalerie, the exhibition brings together historical works spanning Cattelan's three-decade career alongside new commissions made for the space, curated by Lisa Botti with museum director Klaus Biesenbach.
A provocateur's homecoming
Cattelan has spent decades turning museums into punchlines with a satirical edge — a wax figure of a kneeling Hitler, a fully functional 18-karat gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim, a taxidermy horse suspended mid-air. His 1999 piece "La Nona Ora," depicting Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, remains one of his most widely reproduced artworks. "Night" marks the first time a survey of that body of work has been staged in Germany, a country whose history has made Cattelan's taste for irreverence toward power and religion a harder sell than in Italy or the United States, according to arts outlet Hube.
The exhibition opened to VIPs on Wednesday evening as part of Berlin Art Week, with extended hours through Sunday before the museum shifts to its regular schedule. Organizers have not detailed every piece going on view, but past Cattelan retrospectives have paired his best-known sculptures with new, site-specific pranks — a pattern the artist has signaled he intends to continue in Berlin.
The show is a coup for the Neue Nationalgalerie, which reopened in 2021 after a six-year, David Chipperfield-led renovation and has used the Preis der Nationalgalerie in recent years to draw attention back to its Mies van der Rohe building as much as to the art inside it.
