Maurizio Cattelan’s Night: A Theatre of History and Memory

Maurizio Cattelan’s major solo exhibition in Germany, Night, is on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin until March 7, 2027. Bringing together important historical works by Cattelan alongside new pieces, it explores key themes in the artist’s oeuvre: the subtle boundary between innocence and violence, the construction of identity, and historical memory.

“An exhibition that distrust chronology and fixed meaning alike. The works do not explain one another; they keep each other awake. Night is what remains when the explanations go home,” says Cattelan about the project. Throughout his career, he has explored the fluid and often controversial relationship between images and the meanings we attach to them. In his sculptures and installations, he has repeatedly returned to the themes of authority, collective memory, social structures, and how cultural symbols shift when placed in an unexpected context—his works often combine irony with unease. In Night at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, this approach takes on an architectural and historical dimension.

Presented as part of the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie, the exhibition brings together works from different periods of Cattelan’s career with new commissions, including Purgatory, People, Scar, After and Dust. Mies van der Rohe’s glass pavilion, with its openness, symmetry, and monumental scale, is essential to the exhibition, as it shapes how viewers perceive the works and their relationship to one another.

“A stone in someone’s shoe”

Born in Padua in 1960, Cattelan began his career in the late 1980s without formal artistic training. Over more than three decades, he has developed a body of sculptures and installations that reflect on authority, collective memory and social power structures. Although his works are primarily sculptural, he has described them above all as images. 

Cattelan once said that he sometimes likes to think of himself as “a stone in someone’s shoe.” He creates a persistent disturbance without providing a definitive answer. His works can be humorous, unsettling, theatrical, or unexpectedly intimate, and they leave viewers negotiating between contradictory responses. This is evident in Night, where Cattelan brings together religious, political, and historical imagery alongside themes of death, childhood, power, and national identity.

The exhibition is site-specific, with the Neue Nationalgalerie itself becoming a significant part of Cattelan’s work.The glass walls of Mies van der Rohe’s building blur the distinction between inside and outside, while the plan offers no conventional sequence of rooms, corridors, or defined thresholds. Cattelan describes it as having “almost no hierarchy,” with no clear beginning or end. As the artist explains, he wanted to give the space a certain rhythm without changing its inherent character. 

In this exhibition, the Neue Nationalgalerie becomes a kind of contemporary church, which has less to do with religion than with spatial organization: the building’s scale, symmetry, silence, and distance from everyday life give it a ritual character. For Night, Cattelan created a structure resembling a central nave and side aisles, with the works positioned to form a sequence of elevated, suspended, and grounded figures.

The arrangement of the works is therefore central to the show. Him (2001), a small figure of Adolf Hitler kneeling on the floor, is positioned in relation to Dawn, (2007)  where a young woman is suspended above the viewer inside a wooden transport crate. Together, the two works form a vertical axis that juxtaposes vulnerability and power, sacrifice and devotion: the figure of Hitler, responsible for unspeakable atrocities and crimes against humanity, appears in a position of submission, while the elevated female figure evokes exposure and sacrifice. Above them, thousands of taxidermied pigeons in People (2026) fill the roof structure, turning the composition into a meditation on collectivity and memory.

Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan’s Night, featuring Him (2001) and Dawn (2007), at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

What happens at night

The shifting relationship between familiar images is also key to understanding the exhibition’s title, Night. For Cattelan, night is different from darkness: it is less about what we see than about how we experience the world when things become less certain. Darkness limits visibility, while night can make familiar things feel less clear and harder to understand. This distinction explains how the works in the exhibition relate to one another. Cattelan does not conceal information; on the contrary, he often gives the viewer enough detail to recognize a reference immediately. What changes is the relationship between the image and its context.

Him is perhaps the most direct example. Approached from behind, the sculpture first resembles a small child kneeling in prayer. As the viewer moves closer, the figure emerges as Adolf Hitler. The work forces two radically different images into the same encounter—childhood innocence and historical atrocity. Cattelan has described Him as an attempt to confront “absolute evil,” but the sculpture does not offer a simple or definitive explanation. It creates a tension between what we recognize and how we respond to it: the image of Hitler as a dictator gives way to that of an ordinary, almost vulnerable-looking body, making it difficult to separate our understanding of evil from the way it is represented. In Berlin, this encounter inevitably carries additional historical weight.

In his oeuvre, Cattelan has repeatedly returned to Germany and its history, most notably in Never (2003), La rivoluzione siamo noi (2000), and the new Purgatory (2026). Installed on the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Never depicts a young drummer based on Oskar Matzerath, the protagonist of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum—a child growing up in Danzig as Nazism rises to power and Germany enters the Second World War. Disgusted by the adult world, he decides at the age of three to stop growing and uses his drum to resist it, responding to and commenting on the events unfolding around him. In Cattelan’s version, the drum becomes an unsettling and ambiguous soundtrack to the surrounding city, resembling a parade, an alarm, a funeral march, or a circus performance.

Purgatory brings another Berlin symbol into the museum. Cattelan has recreated the Brandenburg Gate in richly toned wood at a smaller scale, allowing visitors to walk around and through it. Commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia and designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans, it was originally conceived as a civic monument. Over time, it became associated with Prussian power, Napoleon’s occupation, the division of Berlin during the Cold War, and German reunification. By bringing these different moments together, Cattelan highlights how the meaning of a symbol changes with its historical context.

Maurizio Cattelan. Never (2003) at the Neue Nationalgalerie

Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan’s Night, featuring Purgatory (2026) and People (2026), at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Without heroes

Alongside these historical references, Night repeatedly returns to the body: Cattelan places figures and animals that embody strength, movement, or authority into states of vulnerability, exhaustion, and suspension. In All (2007), nine life-sized marble figures lie on the floor beneath shrouds. With no reference to a particular historical event, Cattelan describes the work as an image of “the death of everybody”: the anonymous bodies can evoke war, catastrophe, epidemic, or ritual, leaving the meaning open.

The animals in Night continue this exploration of vulnerability. In Novecento (1997), a taxidermied horse, a symbol of nobility and military power, hangs motionless from the ceiling, exhausted and powerless. Cattelan has described the work as a self-portrait of a time when he felt caught between ambition and inertia. In Bones (2025), the same opposition appears in a monumental white eagle lying on the floor with its wings spread, appearing defeated or even dead.

Religious imagery runs through Night, but Cattelan does not use it to make a straightforward statement about faith. He is interested in the visual language through which belief has been represented, while leaving the interpretations open. The church-like arrangement of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the cruciform position of Dawn, the shrouded bodies of All, Purgatory, and the pigeons of People all evoke Christian visual traditions. In First (2025), a white marble egg, a symbol of birth, fertility, and potential, is pierced by an iron nail, introducing violence while also holding the fragile form in place. The sculpture brings these opposing forces together, intertwining life and destruction, preservation and damage in a single image.

This uncertainty also appears in the way Cattelan represents himself. Self-portraiture has been a recurring part of his practice, but his self-images are never conventional portraits.. In We (2010) two identical figures of Cattelan lie side by side on a wooden bed. The title points to collectivity, while the duplication raises questions about where one self ends and another begins. In La rivoluzione siamo noi (2000), Cattelan appears as a miniature figure dressed in a suit based on Joseph Beuys’s iconic felt clothing, hanging from a metal clothing rack. The work refers to Beuys’s 1972 poster, in which the artist walks forward beneath the words “We are the revolution.” Cattelan shifts Beuys’s imposing image into one of self-irony, making his own figure visibly smaller and reducing himself to an object on a clothing rack.

Taken together, the works in Night return to a series of themes that run through Cattelan’s practice: authority and failure, memory and forgetting, life and death, humour and tragedy, belief and doubt. The exhibition does not seek to resolve these contradictions, leaving room for uncertainty and multiple readings. Night is temporary. Even when morning remains out of sight, it is still possible.

Maurizio Cattelan. NIGHT
September 10, 2026 – March 7, 2027
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin