Maurizio Cattelan. NIGHT
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
10 September 2026 – 7 March 2027
In his latest major solo exhibition, NIGHT, Cattelan brings together seminal historical works and new commissions to shatter our certainties, confront the weight of history, and keep the ghosts of the past awake.
As visitors step into Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for Maurizio Cattelan’s latest major solo exhibition, NIGHT, they enter through Purgatory (2026), a newly commissioned work that places a scaled-down Brandenburg Gate inside the museum. One of Germany’s most recognizable monuments is thus transformed into a space of passage, reflection, and historical ambiguity—a threshold into a contemporary cathedral where irreverence, human fragility, and historical memory are liturgically staged.
“A church is a beautiful invention because it 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.”
— Maurizio Cattelan
Cattelan was reflecting on the site-specific nature of his show, which treats Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass hall as an integral part of the exhibition itself.
Recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026—Germany’s most prestigious museum award for contemporary art—Cattelan brings together seminal historical works and new commissions in this exhibition, which runs until March 2027.
“Night is not simply the absence of light. It is a condition. The exhibition is not about darkness; it is about the loss of certainty. Night is also temporary—it always contains the possibility of morning, even if you cannot see it yet,” continues Cattelan, explaining the title of the show. Based on these ideas, NIGHT takes shape around themes of history, power, memory, identity, and belief.
Across the exhibition, familiar images and figures are shifted just enough to unsettle their meaning, opening them to readings that move between irony and ambiguity. “The works do not explain one another; they keep each other awake.”
At the center of the hall, nine bodies carved in white marble and covered after an unnamed tragedy (All, 2007) draw the visitor’s eye toward the floor. As one walks further, the gaze rises toward Him (2001), a kneeling, childlike figure that reveals the face of Adolf Hitler, and elevates toward Dawn (2007), a female figure suspended in a cruciform posture within a coffin-like structure. Overhead, thousands of taxidermied pigeons titled People (2026) occupy the ceiling. Visible yet invisible, they inhabit both the internal and external museum spaces, quietly observing us—ignored and uninvited.
On a diagonal axis that crosses the museum space from the top-left corner to the bottom-right section of the hall, two taxidermied, life-sized animals—a horse hanging from the ceiling (Novecento, 1997) and a donkey remaining attached to a cart after the work has ended (Pentecoste, 2002)—reflect upon the weight of history on the human condition. Animals are frequently used in Cattelan’s work to question human destiny and the collapse of power. Nearby, a marble eagle lies fallen on the ground, symbolizing the end of authority reduced to mere weight and remains, while in the newly commissioned work After (2026), a small dog sleeps inside a large industrial tube. A structure built for passage becomes an accidental shelter; survival begins by giving the world another purpose.
In the two side aisles, Cattelan uses his own image to question identity. Visitors enter two secluded, intimate spaces where miniature mannequins bearing the likeness of the artist are staged in an uncanny and ambiguous way. In the first aisle, two identical figures lie together in the same bed (We, 2010), suggesting companionship, conflict, and the dual selves that can inhabit a single person. In the opposite aisle, a miniature figure of Cattelan himself hangs suspended in space in La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), invoking Joseph Beuys while subverting the heroic, messianic aura of the artist-as-revolutionary and reducing him to an empty suit dangling from a coat rack.
On their way out, visitors leave the gallery amused yet puzzled, angry yet unsettled, with the uncanny drumbeat of a glassy-eyed, mechanical drumming boy (Untitled, 2003) perched precariously on the edge of the exterior roof. Inspired by Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, the figure stands atop Mies van der Rohe’s glass building. In the story, the boy stops growing at the age of three as a deliberate protest against the rise of Nazism and the corrupt world of adults. Whenever the drumming boy feels fear, anger, or faces danger, he beats his drum furiously. Here, the repetitive, rhythmic sound acts as an alarm bell; it symbolizes a warning against contemporary political drifts, reminding viewers that the forces of totalitarianism and social division are never truly gone.
Continue Looking
Cattelan’s NIGHT unfolds through a powerful relationship between artworks, architecture, scale and the viewer’s movement through the exhibition. If you’re interested in exploring how form, perspective and composition can shape the way we experience a space, this Domestika course examines minimalist photography through architecture, scale and human presence.
Acknowledgements
Photography by Ottavia Castellina, contributor to The Art Berries, except where otherwise credited.
Thank you to Tsivi, our Art Berries Guest, for bringing Cattelan’s works to life through her performance.
Leave a Reply