Maurizio Cattelan Turns Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie Into a Church, Minus the Banana

The taped banana and the solid-gold toilet stayed home. Night, Maurizio Cattelan’s first major show at a German museum, skips the jokes he’s best known for and rebuilds Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin as something closer to a church, with new commissions and works from the past 30 years that lean sinister, Hypebeast reports.

You enter through “Purgatory,” a scaled-down wooden Brandenburg Gate. Inside, Cattelan’s kneeling, child-size Hitler, “Him,” faces “Dawn,” a crucified woman held in a transport crate, while thousands of taxidermied pigeons look down from the rafters. A dead horse, “Novecento,” hangs in midair, and a donkey strains under an overloaded cart. The first piece you meet is also the quietest: “Dust,” a fire extinguisher at the entrance that holds the ashes of the artist’s friend.

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.

Maurizio Cattelan, in a press release, Hypebeast

The show opened Sept. 10 during Berlin Art Week and doubles as the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie. Instead of a group show of young artists, the prize now hands one artist the whole building, Artprice notes. Lisa Botti and Klaus Biesenbach curated it with Cattelan, who co-directed the 4th Berlin Biennale 20 years ago.

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Not everyone is moved. In ArtReview, Martin Herbert calls the show extremely German, from the artist’s surname in pink Gothic type on the facade to the animatronic drumming boy on the roof, a nod to Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. But he finds the pseudo-church layout “stiff, airless,” says the whole thing “doesn’t really work” and admits he was ready to leave after 20 minutes. He stayed.

Cattelan’s own pitch is more hopeful. “Night is also temporary,” he continued in the same press release, “it always contains the possibility of morning, even if you cannot see it yet.” Night runs at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, through March 7, 2027.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.