Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026: Maurizio Cattelan

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 deeply unsettling.

As an artist with an international practice, Cattelan brings a distinctly European perspective to questions of identity, responsibility and collective remembrance. His works invite viewers to confront history not as a closed narrative, but as an ongoing, contested process — provocative, critical and poetic. Cattelan’s ironic questioning of authority and “truth” is equally urgent today.
At a moment when institutions — museums, politics and the media — are reassessing their roles and credibility, his work scrutinises structures of power within and beyond the art system, without resorting to moral judgement. By embracing ambiguity and resisting clear-cut positions, his art creates spaces for critical thought.

In the German context, where modes of remembrance are currently being renegotiated, Cattelan’s work acquires renewed relevance. His iconic gestures, oscillating between exaggeration, irony and pain, challenge rituals of commemoration and open new perspectives on contemporary social debates. In times of increasing political polarisation, his subversive humour operates as a liberating force: provocation appears not as cynicism, but as a form of resistance and constructive reflection.

With this exhibition, Maurizio Cattelan returns to Berlin, where he co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006.
The Neue Nationalgalerie, with its iconic building by Mies van der Rohe, provides an ideal setting for this exhibition. Positioned between modernity and the present, it becomes a stage for Cattelan’s multifaceted work — as a mirror, commentary and productive disturbance of our time.

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Botti, curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and made possible by the FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie (FRIENDS of the National Gallery).

• A special exhibition of the Neue Nationalgalerie – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation