Cattelan's Night opens at the Neue Nationalgalerie with ash, a gate and Him
The Preis der Nationalgalerie show runs from 10 September to 7 March. New work includes Dust, a fire extinguisher filled with human ashes, and a reduced Brandenburg Gate. La Nona Ora and the kneeling Hitler sculpture share the Mies van der Rohe hall.
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Maurizio Cattelan's first large solo exhibition in Germany opened on Thursday at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Mies van der Rohe glass hall at the edge of the Tiergarten, under the title Night and under the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie.
Lisa Botti curated the show with Klaus Biesenbach, the museum's director, and with Cattelan. It runs through 7 March 2027. The jury that gave him the prize included Emma Lavigne of the Pinault Collection and Sam Keller of the Fondation Beyeler. Cattelan was born in Padua in 1960 and works between New York and Milan. He co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006. That is the tie the museum used to justify a prize that has usually gone to artists with a tighter Berlin biography.
The banana is not in the building. Comedian, the duct-taped fruit that became a market event, stays outside this hang. What is inside is a church-like plan of older shocks and new commissions. La Nona Ora, the 1999 sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite, shares air with Him, the 2001 kneeling figure with a child's body and Hitler's face. Visitors who know only the banana now have to stand between a fallen pontiff and a praying dictator in a hall designed as a temple of clear glass.
New work carries the date. Dust (2026) is a fire extinguisher filled with human ashes. The museum and early reviews treat the material as actual remains. A reduced wooden Brandenburg Gate, close to 20 feet high in the previews, stands as a model of a gate that has meant both division and reopening in this city. An animatronic Oskar Matzerath, the boy from Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, was planned for the roof edge above the entrance, with taxidermied pigeons around him. Whether every rooftop element is live on opening day will be checked by anyone who walks Potsdamer Strasse and looks up.
Cattelan staged a dinner on the museum terrace in August and called it the Last Supper. Biesenbach and Botti sat the table. The guest list published later included Katharina Grosse, Elmgreen and Dragset, Rosa Barba, Tianzhuo Chen, Göksu Kunak and Kiani del Valle. Del Valle is listed to perform during Berlin Art Week, which coincides with the opening.
The show arrives in a city that has spent a year arguing about which historical images belong in public rooms. Him has been shown before and has been protested before. Putting it in Mies's hall, across from a pope under a rock, is the argument Cattelan is willing to reopen. Dust makes a different claim. A fire extinguisher is an object of emergency. Filling it with ash turns the tool into a container of the thing it cannot put out. That is a precise joke, if it is a joke.
Ticket lines wrapped the pavilion on opening day. Night does not explain itself on the wall more than the labels require. The information gain for a reader who already knows the banana is the inventory: ashes in an extinguisher, a wooden gate, a tin-drum boy on a roof, and two sculptures from the turn of the century placed where Berlin cannot pretend it does not know their faces.
