{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/maurizio-cattelan-night-neue-nationalgalerie-berlin-review-martin-herbert/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127651,"slug":"maurizio-cattelan-night-neue-nationalgalerie-berlin-review-martin-herbert","title":"Who Is Maurizio Cattelan For?","excerpt":"The controversy-courting Banana-man’s big German survey doesn’t show us much that we don’t already know, says Martin Herbert ","content":"\n

The controversy-courting Banana-man’s big German exhibition doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know, says Martin Herbert

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The first signs that Maurizio Cattelan’s Night might be a location-specific show arrive before you’ve even entered the Neue Nationalgalerie. First, the artist’s surname is emblazoned in a pink German Gothic typeface across the frontage of Mies van der Rohe’s big glass box. Second, sitting on the roof and flanked by a long row of the Italian artist’s signature taxidermy pigeons, is his 2003 animatronic figure Never. This glassy-eyed boychild periodically jerks into life, thumping a drum in clear reference to Günter Grass’s milestone 1959 novel, The Tin Drum, in which a little boy traumatised by the rise of Nazism refuses to reach adulthood, preferring to beat the titular instrument in a perpetual reminder of horrors. Once you’re inside, meanwhile, the entrance to Cattelan’s first big exhibition in Germany is through the transitional sculpture Purgatory (2026), a scaled-down wooden replica of the nearby Brandenburg Gate: a portal into Berlin’s long history from the relatively peaceful late eighteenth-century to twentieth-century division and reconnection. How German is it, all of this? Extremely, so far.

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Never, 2003 (installation view), resin, fiberglass, ABS, clothes, shoes, metal, drum, synthetic hair, paint, electronic and mechanical components. Photo: David von Becker. Courtesy the artist and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Inside, Cattelan has repurposed works dating from the 1990s to the recent past into a compact retrospective that also functions as, yes, a gesamtkunstwerk. The ground-floor space is clearly intended as an ersatz church, with an apse-positioned crucifixion – 2007’s Dawn, of which more shortly – in front of which sits a small, suited, genuflecting figure, his back to us. Semi-symmetrical would-be-transept areas, meanwhile, each contain a lifesize, taxidermied, off-the-ground equid, a kind of stand-in for fragile humanity. On the left as you enter is Cattelan’s well-known Novecento (1997), the animal suspended arch-backed from the ceiling: in this context, the handout asserts, either ascending or collapsing. On the right is Pentecost (2002), a taxidermy donkey strapped to an overly heavy cart – laden with antique-looking wrapped parcels – whose weight has lofted the ass into the air. The implicit meaning of this work is up in the air too; it suggests, perhaps, an inability to move forward due to the weight of the past, or just destabilisation per se.

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Novecento, 1997 (installation view), taxidermied horse, leather saddle, rope. Photo: David von Becker. Courtesy the artist and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Near it, one of several other sculptures arrayed around the floorspace, is Bones (2025), a big white marble representation of that contentious German symbol of imperial might, the eagle, crashed down to earth (and looked down on, from the rafters, by scads more of Cattelan’s invasive pigeons). Centrally positioned in a row bisecting the show’s ‘nave’ is the spiritual-secular All (2007), nine marble sculptures of veiled bodies; while clearly referencing Giuseppe Sanmartino’s 1753 Veiled Christ in a church in Naples, these could be downed soldiers or civilians, their covers’ softly rippled surfaces containing none of Sanmartino’s incredible detailing. You move past them towards the small, dark-haired praying figure, who seasoned Cattelan-watchers will already have clocked as the controversy-courting Him (2001), his child-size Hitler, asking here for – what? Forgiveness? He’s looking at, or actually looking slightly past, Dawn, the work’s travestied crucifixion, which sits within a packing crate, suspended in the air. In the wooden box is a female, ponytailed figure in a vaguely institutional white outfit, facing away from us – this sculpture originally referenced a Francesca Woodman photograph and was previously shown face-forward, out of its crate – and held in place by classic art-transport appurtenances: wooden doodads pinning down her arms and legs, a wooden crossbar across her spine. All of this suggests, at first, restraining devices in a primitive mental hospital; though the woman’s hands, you notice, have stigmatising nails through them. This is, at least momentarily, a shocking image.

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There are other, quieter, equally mortality-centric works in the show, from Dust (2026), a standard-looking fire extinguisher that contains the cremated remains of one of Cattelan’s friends, to – tucked away in the cloakroom – La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (We Are the Revolution, 2000), a miniature Cattelan dressed in a Joseph Beuys-like felt suit and hung inertly from a coatrack, a danger to nobody. But what you might get from the above description is that the exhibition is a swirl of pointedly unresolved, intersecting energies and moods, or perhaps one big hinge. It’s called Night, a wall text suggests, because that’s where it feels like we are right now, a period of darkness and doubt, a statement that verges on period kitsch, as does the further assertion that – and remember there’s a work titled Dawn – day must follow night. Well, maybe. As the show opened, Germany’s neofascist Alternative for Germany party won, to the horror of most, a German state election, though it fell short of an absolute majority. Like Night, the future (of Germany, of Cattelan’s already far-right-governed homeland, of Europe, of the world) poises on a knife-edge.

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Night, 2026, installation view at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo: David von Becker. Courtesy the artist and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
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Cattelan, here, is nothing if not timely and remains gifted at attention-snaring iconography and canny recycling of older works. And yet somehow, taken as a whole, Night doesn’t really work and certainly doesn’t make one want to linger. The pseudo-ecclesiastical layout, intended apparently to suggest that art museums are the gathering spaces that churches used to be, is stiff, airless and forces invidious comparisons with Robert Gober’s much more powerful, cruciform-structured and genuinely atmospheric and mysterious installation Untitled (1995–97). You look at the individual sculptures, see what they are and what they’re pointing towards, and feel little desire to look at them again. I was ready to walk out of the show after 20 minutes, though I didn’t, and indeed there were as many people trying to get their money’s worth by reading the big, entrance-flanking, illustrated wall texts describing Cattelan’s entire career as there were perambulating around the gallery. It may be that his trickster-gadfly reputation and very means of production doesn’t jibe with the zeitgeist-capturing gravitas he strives for here. It may be that thematic uncertainty, which if deployed ought to spread, stainlike, throughout a show, and this artist’s quickfire sculptural style of cartoonish verisimilitude don’t sit well together, or that the latter has just not aged well. Or it may be simply that Night, even in its strategic equivocations, doesn’t show or tell us much that we can’t already feel, quiveringly, in our bones.

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Night at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, through 7 March

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Read next Does Pierre Huyghe Have a Problem With Women?

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