Maurizio Cattelan: Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026

The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is one of the most influential positions in contemporary art and has been awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026.

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  Maurizio Cattelan, Neue Nationalgalerie, 2025

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  Maurizio Cattelan, Porträt, 2025

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From September 2026 to February 2027, he will be represented in Germany for the first time with a comprehensive solo exhibition.

Since the early 1990s, Maurizio Cattelan (*1960, Padua) has shaped the international art discourse with works that move between sculpture, installation and conceptual practice and consistently defy unambiguous interpretations. His works are characterized by sharp humour, bitter seriousness and combine provocation with a profound reflection on social, political and historical structures.

Iconic works such as La Nona Ora (1999), the depiction of Pope John Paul II, hit by a meteorite, Him (2001) or an animatronic sculpture based on the main character from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, exemplify Cattelan's artistic strategy. He uses shock, irritation and moral ambivalence to raise central questions of our time: Questions of guilt and responsibility, power and powerlessness, memory and collective trauma. His practice is permeated by an aesthetic of "comic existentialism" - a combination of humor and tragedy, irony and profundity that makes his works simultaneously accessible and disturbing. His works invite us to understand history not as a closed narrative, but as something that must be constantly renegotiated: critical, provocative and poetic at the same time. His ironic questioning of authority and "truth" is of contemporary urgency. At moments when institutions - museums, politics, the media - are redefining their role and credibility, he focuses on power relations within and outside the art system without making moral judgments. His art opens up spaces for ambivalence and resists simple positioning.

Cattelan's works are particularly topical in the German context, in which forms of remembrance are currently being renegotiated. His iconic gestures, which oscillate between exaggeration, irony and pain, question rituals of remembrance and open up new perspectives on social debates. At a time of increasing political polarization, his subversive humour unfolds a liberating power: provocation does not appear here as cynicism, but as a form of resistance and constructive reflection.

The exhibition marks Maurizio Cattelan's return to Berlin, where, as co-curator of the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006, he made a significant contribution to the city's international positioning as a center of contemporary art.

The Neue Nationalgalerie, with its iconic building by Mies van der Rohe, provides an ideal setting for this exhibition. As a place between modernism and the present, it becomes a stage for Cattelan's multi-layered work - as a mirror, commentary and disruptive moment of our time.

Runtime: Thu, 10/09/2026 to Sun, 21/02/2027

Takes place here:

• Neue Nationalgalerie

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