Cattelan’s Retreat: From Irony to Gathering
Maurizio Cattelan returns to Berlin twenty years after co-curating the 4th Berlin Biennale. His return raises a question that has become increasingly difficult for his work to evade: what remains of irony once transgression has been fully absorbed by the institutions and markets it once unsettled?
NIGHT, Cattelan’s first major solo exhibition in Germany, brings historical works and new
commissions into Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie as part of the 2026 Preis der
Nationalgalerie. Curated by Lisa Botti and Klaus Biesenbach in close collaboration with the artist, it places Cattelan’s unstable images and gestures within a building associated with clarity, order and transparency. The encounter is architectural as much as conceptual. Mies’s glass hall embodies a modernist fantasy in which formal reduction might produce a space approaching neutrality: architecture stripped of historical excess, its structure rendered visible and its boundaries seemingly dissolved. Cattelan enters this space through a different logic. His works destabilize familiar images, forcing recognition to coexist with uncertainty. What appears transparent becomes ambiguous; what seems comic turns disturbing; what looks irreverent carries the weight of historical memory.
This tension is already inscribed in Cattelan’s trajectory. His 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, All, gathered 130 works suspended from the rotunda’s oculus. At the moment of maximu institutional consecration, Cattelan announced his retirement from art-making. Five years later, he returned with America (2016), a fully functional eighteen-karat-gold toilet installed in a museum restroom: luxury object, market joke and invitation to participation at once. Its force lay in an unresolved contradiction: the museum could contain the critique while becoming its spectacular setting. That contradiction has since intensified. Cattelan’s provocations are no longer external to the museum system. They belong to its history, collections, exhibitions and market mythology. The Trojan horse has been welcomed inside so many times that the distinction between weapon and furniture becomes difficult to sustain.
Installation view © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / David von Becker
NIGHT arrives at this impasse and asks whether critique might have to move elsewhere. Its curatorial vocabulary is revealing: gathering, reflection, attention. These terms describe a mode of inhabiting the museum rather than an individual encounter with a provocative object. The new site-specific commission intervenes in the spatial framework of the Neue Nationalgalerie, altering how the building is used and experienced. The relationship between viewer, work and architecture becomes less predictable. The shift suggests a different model of institutional critique. Earlier forms often relied on exposure, making visible the mechanisms through which museums produce value, authority and meaning. Cattelan’s proposition here is more elusive: NIGHT experiments with changing the conditions of experience from within the institution itself. Whether this constitutes genuine evolution or a more sophisticated form of domestication remains unresolved. That ambiguity may be the exhibition’s most significant achievement.
The title NIGHT introduces another dimension. Night is a condition of incomplete visibility:
objects remain present while certainty about their meaning becomes unstable. The modern museum traditionally promises illumination through classification, visibility and historical ordering. Cattelan has long complicated that promise. Here, the complication becomes the environment. Works including Novecento (1997), La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), Him (2001) and Untitled (2003), alongside new commissions, revisit recurring tensions in his practice: innocence and violence, comedy and mortality, identity and authority, individual memory and collective history. Their meanings remain suspended between recognition and estrangement. In Berlin, this refusal of resolution acquires particular force. Few cities carry such an unstable relationship between architecture, historical memory and the representation of the past. Cattelan’s images enter this landscape without offering a single interpretation. His figures remain caught between ridicule and seriousness, vulnerability and spectacle.
The question is no longer simply whether Cattelan can still shock. He can. The more
consequential question is whether shock can still constitute critique. Once provocation becomes collectible, reproducible and institutionally celebrated, irony risks becoming a style rather than a strategy. The joke remains while its target becomes less certain. The museum can absorb the gesture, historicize it and convert it into cultural capital. NIGHT recognizes this impasse and shifts the register toward attention: gathering rather than spectacle, uncertainty rather than resolution. The viewer is asked to reconsider the conditions under which seeing itself takes place.
Maurizio Cattelan, NIGHT, installations. Photo: David von Becker © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
This is where Mies becomes essential. The glass walls of the Neue Nationalgalerie promise transparency, yet transparency is never neutral. Every act of making visible determines what can be seen, from where and under which conditions. The building’s apparent openness can therefore be read as a particular regime of visibility. NIGHT makes that assumption perceptible. The exhibition proposes a paradox. If irony has been absorbed by the institution, critique may need to operate through different institutional experiences: slower, more collective, less certain.
Cattelan has not escaped the apparatus he has spent decades provoking. The artist, museum and market remain entangled. What changes is the question being asked from within that entanglement.
What emerges when transgression is no longer transgressive?
What forms of critique remain once everything can be exhibited, collected, historicized and sold?
NIGHT offers no definitive answer. Its significance lies in making uncertainty itself part of the encounter. In the darkness implied by its title, critique and complicity become harder to separate. Visibility loses its status as an unquestioned good. The museum becomes an active participant in the production of meaning.
Cattelan’s retreat, then, may be less a withdrawal from the institution than a retreat from the old logic of provocation. What remains is quieter and potentially more difficult: the work of attention. To gather without certainty. To look without assuming that visibility guarantees
understanding. To remain with an image after the joke has disappeared. To resist the demand that everything become immediately legible, marketable and resolved.
If irony was once Cattelan’s Trojan horse, NIGHT asks what happens after the horse has been welcomed inside.Perhaps critique begins again there — with the possibility of staying together in the dark.
Main Image: Maurizio Cattelan, 2026, Detail © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Ivan Erofeev