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Maurizio Cattelan, one of the most influential contemporary artists, will be honored with the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie. This will be Cattelan's first solo exhibition in Germany. His works, which range from sculpture and installation to conceptual practice, are characterized by sharp humor, bitter seriousness, and a profound reflection on social structures.
Image gallery
Maurizio Cattelan, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The National Gallery Prize exhibition will open at the Neue Nationalgalerie during Berlin Art Week in September 2026.
Since the early 1990s, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960 in Padua) has been one of the defining voices in international art. His iconic works—including La Nona Ora (1999), a figure of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite; Him (2001), a praying schoolboy with the face of Adolf Hitler; and Untitled (2003), an animatronic sculpture that references the protagonist of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum—show how Cattelan uses the potential of shock, irritation, and moral ambivalence to raise central questions of our time: guilt, responsibility, power, and collective trauma.
Cattelan's artistic practice is permeated by an aesthetic of “comic existentialism”—a combination of humor and tragedy, irony and profundity that makes his works appear both accessible and enigmatic.
With this exhibition, Maurizio Cattelan returns to Berlin, where he co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006.
The exhibition in the upper hall of the Mies van der Rohe building is curated by Lisa Botti, curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and made possible by the Friends of the National Gallery.
- A special exhibition of the Neue Nationalgalerie – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
