Maurizio Cattelan, the art world\u2019s merriest prankster, pauses when asked which object in his sprawling new Berlin show is most likely to be defaced, stolen or eaten, then emits a foghorn of a laugh. \u201cThere is no need to vandalise anything,\u201d says the trim, soulful Italian, explaining that he has already taken care of all that, given how the work cuts villains, imposters and straw men down to size. \u201cBut,\u201d he says, referring to the show\u2019s more daring works, \u201cmaybe we need someone to resuscitate people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cattelan, who speaks in a lilting English, grins broadly, a mischievous glint in his brown eyes. Speaking on the subterranean level of Mies van der Rohe\u2019s weightless Neue Nationalgalerie<\/a> (NNG) in Berlin, he darts between the impish and the profound in conversation, mirroring the dizzying range of his work. The silver-haired sculptor is best known for duct-taping a banana to a wall in 2019 and calling it Comedian, in a droll commentary on the excesses of the art market. The joke became even funnier when it sold for $6.2m, then hilarious when its buyer took a bite out of his purchase and swallowed it<\/a>.<\/p>\n Comedian, 2019, the $6.2m banana. Photograph: \u00a9 2025 Maurizio Cattelan<\/p>\n There was also the gold toilet, called America, that was installed in New York\u2019s Guggenheim in 2016, its curators later offering the piece to Donald Trump\u2019s White House <\/a>instead of the Van Gogh that it requested. Thieves later made off with<\/a> the 18-carat loo when it went on display at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill\u2019s Oxfordshire birthplace.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s rare to be with an artist who\u2019s recognised on the street,\u201d says NNG director Klaus Biesenbach. \u201cHe reached a level of accessibility with these very easy-to-communicate ideas: \u2018Oh God, a person puts a banana on the wall and it\u2019s sold for six million!\u2019 He is a very deep thinker who camouflages seriousness with humour, and who camouflages the sublime with irony.\u201d<\/p>\n Night, Cattelan\u2019s first major solo exhibition in Germany, was granted to him as winner of this year\u2019s Neue Nationalgalerie prize honouring influential contemporary artists. Cattelan collaborated with curator Lisa Botti on new commissions, as well as selecting historic works from the past three decades, noticeably skipping over his greatest hits. \u201cThey were part of a different conversation,\u201d he says. \u201cMy work has always been serious. The problem is people often stop at the joke.\u201d<\/p>\n The show spotlights the wax and wane of power, the contentiousness of collective memory, and the horror and hope of history, as symbolised by its scarred and vibrant host city. \u201cNight,\u201d he says, \u201cis a beautiful title. We sleep, we love, we dream, we fear. It\u2019s a moment where things get fuzzy. And after night, there is dawn and another day. But it\u2019s definitely a suspended moment \u2013 a magic moment.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation mark<\/p>\n \u2018I suffer when making a show \u2013 but I\u00a0love the rush. It\u2019s a fix, a dependency\u2019\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At the entrance, peering down from the roof, the 2003 work Never features Oskar, G\u00fcnter Grass\u2019s eerie child witness to the Nazi era from his novel The Tin Drum<\/a>, silently beating out his warning. Purgatory, created for the show, presents a stunted-scale version of Berlin\u2019s Brandenburg Gate as an ambivalent landmark, a portal for visitors to rethink their engagement with European history.<\/p>\n Kneeling for $17m \u2026 Him, from 2001, is Cattelan\u2019s most controversial \u2013 and lucrative \u2013 sculpture. Photograph: Attilio Maranzano\/Maurizio Cattelan<\/p>\n Him, from 2001, features a diminutive kneeling man who is revealed to be Adolf Hitler in a prayer-like pose, facing off against 2007\u2019s Dawn, a female figure with real human hair, her hands pinned in a crucifixion pose. Overhead, thousands of stuffed pigeons are absorbed by the black ceiling. They, for Cattelan, are \u201ca menacing presence\u201d, though Botti adds: \u201cIt\u2019s also about the holy spirit, about looking up. It\u2019s a bit of optimism.\u201d Then there\u2019s La Nona Ora, or The Ninth Hour, an infamous work from 1999 showing Pope John Paul II resplendent in ceremonial garb, having been struck down by a meteorite.<\/p>\n The Hitler piece Him has been Cattelan\u2019s most lucrative, selling for $17.2m in 2016. It had courted controversy in Warsaw, where it was displayed on the site of the wartime ghetto, recalling the day in 1970 when West German chancellor Willy Brandt dropped to his knees<\/a> in front of the city\u2019s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes to beg forgiveness for the crimes of the Nazi era. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called Cattelan\u2019s work<\/a> \u201ca senseless provocation\u201d.<\/p>\n Cattelan is satisfied the Night exhibition is in the right place at the right time, lending the works fresh power. He confesses to a certain obsession with the darkest chapters of German history, but primarily for the universality of their nightmarish resonance. \u201cHitler in this case represents evil,\u201d he says. \u201cIt could have been Genghis Khan or another very popular, very famous leader.\u201d He is unafraid of the possibility of a Berlin audience questioning his right to borrow from German iconography, \u201clike if I was wearing rasta hair or something\u201d. Cultural appropriation, he believes, is a \u201cvery American\u201d accusation.<\/p>\n \u2018My Catholicism comes out when I don\u2019t want it to!\u2019 \u2026 The Ninth Hour (1999). Photograph: Dominik Pluess\/AP<\/p>\n Cattelan calls the NNG \u201can incredible building\u201d and considers this modernist masterpiece with its famously windswept plaza \u201ca major contributor\u201d to the show. \u201cThere is no separation between inside and outside here,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to find a way not to dominate it, not to be dominated but to have a conversation. I connected with the idea of a church. My Catholicism comes out when I don\u2019t want it to! But this time it came out as a structure, on this idea of central axes through the exhibition.\u201d Botti describes Cattelan\u2019s work as \u201ccomic existentialism\u201d, saying: \u201cYou laugh about something, but then the laugh gets stuck in your throat.\u201d<\/p>\n His work comments on an era of crumbling social structures and disinformation, created by an artist who divides his time between Trump\u2019s US and Italy under hard-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni<\/a>, choosing New York and Milan as his bases. \u201cInternationally, there is now a resurgence of people asking for more strong leadership: Meloni is a very cunning and astute politician.\u201d Expressing a grudging admiration for her unusual staying power, he says: \u201cIt\u2019s disappointing to think that the left weren\u2019t able to produce, in all the occasions they had, such stability. What didn\u2019t they have that she has?\u201d He suggests an answer: scapegoats. \u201cWe have always these enemies that are offered to us. They give us problems that probably we don\u2019t have. But nobody has the magic wand.\u201d<\/p>\n Cattelan was born to a working-class family in Padua, a historic city 40km west of Venice, and famously had no formal art training. Having Berlin put on one of his most ambitious exhibitions in years has felt like a kind of homecoming, given it\u2019s now 20 years since he co-curated the fourth Biennale<\/a>, a barn-burner of a show that made the most of the now-restored capital\u2019s \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d era<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMaurizio really participated in Berlin becoming Berlin,\u201d says Klaus Biesenbach, director of the NNG, calling that 2006 biennale \u201ca watershed moment for this city\u201d and its creative scene. Cattelan believes Berlin \u201cstill carries scars, history, contradictions \u2013 it\u2019s a sort of outdoor experiment\u201d. He credited it with helping him recapture part of his youth, his days spent as a postman, a mortuary attendant and a sperm donor. \u201cBerlin definitely was about clubbing,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was very interesting because in Berlin stuff can grow overnight, last like a mushroom for a few days and then disappear. [Clubbing] was something I didn\u2019t experience during my 20s or 30s. I had a serious \u2026 well, four or five years of taking back lost time. It was beautiful, it was very raw. Now it\u2019s over again. The city became more mature.\u201d<\/p>\n Novecento (1997), showing in the Castello di Rivoli in Torino. Photograph: Paolo Pellion di Persano\/Maurizio Cattelan<\/p>\n For Cattelan, the 2010s brought a highly publicised retirement, then a ferocious comeback. \u201cAt that time, it was like that pressure, the anxiety, the making of the shows we were producing \u2013 you reach a level where it\u2019s like\u201d \u2013 he makes a drowning sound \u2013 \u201cwhere you have to raise a white flag.\u201d<\/p>\n Each major exhibition sends him on a rollercoaster of exhilaration and panic, he says, admitting to being \u201cextremely desperate\u201d while planning Night. \u201cDo I suffer? Yes, I don\u2019t like it. It\u2019s always a challenge. I still need the rush. It\u2019s a contradiction, but I love the hate of making a show. It\u2019s a fix. It\u2019s a dependency. Maybe a therapist would say, \u2018We can solve your addiction problem.\u2019 And I\u2019d say, \u2018No, no, I love it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n