“Sometimes,” the goal of a radical gesture is not “to be louder, but to be more precise,” Maurizio Cattelan writes, replying to my question about the fate of exaggeration, absurdity, and irreverence in art during a political moment beyond satire. (As I correspond with the Italian artist over email early in the summer, an octagonal fighting cage is being erected on the White House lawn; by the time you read this, no doubt something just as breathtakingly—or tediously—obscene will be in the news.) But, as I think about Cattelan’s career in advance of his first major institutional solo exhibition in Germany—at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, which opens Sept. 10—it seems that precision has always been the ineffable quality, or the saving grace, of his art at its best. Though famously, his work, often fabricated realist sculptures and readymades, can seem loud as well, hinging on crude provocation.
It has seemed, or perhaps become, loud thanks to its mass-media amplification. The artist, a canny autodidact, was born in Padua in 1960 to a working-class family and skipped art school to learn the arcane codes of the art world on his own. And though he’s indisputably been a blue-chip insider for a long time—early, he showed in Milan with gallerist Massimo De Carlo, and his New York breakout was with Marian Goodman in 2000—maybe that underdog, outsider vantage has helped him reach beyond a rarefied milieu: He’s responsible for a startling number of crossover hits.
There’s his statue of a toppled Pope John Paul II, pinned to the ground by a meteorite, which caused a stir in 1999; his 18-karat gold toilet, America, 2016, a storied edition of three (with one acquired by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and another missing after a heist at Blenheim Palace, where it was exhibited in a bathroom used by Winston Churchill); and, most of all, there is the viral Comedian, 2019, that banana duct-taped to a wall, which has split a vast audience into camps: enthusiasts and big spenders on one side, the outraged and the eye-rolling on the other. The latter group represents the perennial “it’s not art” objections to the readymade, heightened by the ubiquity of the materials and perishability of the fruit (not to mention the price tag); it also includes strains of pro-Duchampian exasperation with the interminable spectacle of the whole affair.
Exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, editions of the work, initially priced at $120,000, were snapped up quickly from Perrotin’s booth. At auction five years later, the piece would command more than $6 million from crypto billionaire Justin Sun, a then-ardent supporter of the U.S. president and investor in his $TRUMP meme coin. (Sun has since sued the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, alleging fraud; the company has counter-sued for defamation.)
When I speak to New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni, a longtime collaborator of Cattelan’s, about the banana, he cites art historian and critic Hal Foster’s concept of “mimetic exacerbation,” by which an artist seeks to expose something (i.e., with Comedian, maybe the insanity of art fairs, the financialization of art, or the Trumpian glorification of grift) by pushing it to its logical, ludicrous (loudest) extreme. But when Sun posted on X about his newly acquired conceptual artwork (whose value is located in its certificate of authenticity, not in any particular banana), deeming it emblematic of a “cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community,” I thought that sounded sadly correct; Comedian is too easily absorbed as a red-chip circus prop for it to be read as critique.
Still, one can value exactitude and practice precision while making noise, while succeeding or failing at mimetic exacerbation. Though cavalier in appearance, Comedian, Gioni swears, is a piece that Cattelan had been mulling over for not just a year, as the artist himself has stated, but for a decade or more. I believe it: For everything in the artist’s body of work since the early 1990s that could be categorized as a stunt, more statements reflect the ruthless editing, the process of distillation, that imbues his objects with their iconographic economy; that inspire quiet; that are melancholic or even tragic in tone.
Despite his reputation as a provocateur, Cattelan leverages disorienting, disturbing effects distinct from those of the edgelord’s calculated offense.
In “NIGHT,” as Cattelan’s Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition is titled, one particular work will, no doubt, function as a kind of keystone, however it’s installed. Him, 2001, the artist’s lifelike wax sculpture of Adolf Hitler, is among his most famous works, an image and gesture of such historical and moral scope that it signals an irrevocable, always-and-forever artistic ambition and commitment to a certain gravitas, for better or worse, whatever clowning around his body of work might also encompass. Kneeling, in civilian gray tweed, shrunken to a grade-school child’s proportions, the Führer has usually been shown facing away from an approaching viewer—though not when Him was included in the artist’s 2011 retrospective, “All.”
There, some 130 pieces of his works were hung by rope, filling the void of the New York Guggenheim’s famous rotunda, like stylized detritus held aloft in a hurricane, or clothes drying on laundry lines. It was a fantastically flaccid and makeshift-looking installation, a self-effacing swan song just before Cattelan’s “retirement.” He returned to art five years later, installing America—the gold toilet—on the museum’s fifth floor (currently, an edition of Comedian is taped to a wall on its fourth).
When I get in touch with the artist Barbara Kruger—who has likewise penetrated pop culture, inadvertently birthed memes, and embraced profound ambiguity with discomfiting boldness in architectural-scale works—to see what she might have to say about Cattelan, I’m not surprised when she says, “He’s done so much that has been brutal, funny, and casually brave,” listing off a handful of works. I wasn’t expecting her to state, with all-caps vehemence, “I thought his Guggenheim atrium installation was one of the best works (or a collection of works) EVER.” But it does make sense, given her own practice, that she would so esteem his recombinant treatment of his own material, irreverence turned back on itself. Him appeared near the top of the rotunda, secured by a strap across its chest, preposterously “strung up” like everything else.
Cattelan has written off the controversial work, which—bravely or blithely, depending on who you ask—dives headfirst into the hazards of representing evil: “You don’t know if this is Hitler praying for another six million people to kill or for forgiveness.” I would add that you also don’t know, in Cattelan’s fictional, frozen moment, if those first six million people are already dead, or if you can still do something to save them. Such is the unease often summoned by the artist’s characters—from Hitler to Pinocchio, from animals to tragicomic effigy-avatars of Cattelan himself. And despite his reputation as a prankster and provocateur, he leverages disorienting, disturbing effects distinct from those of the edgelord’s calculated offense. When the work delivers a jolt, it’s without hostility to the viewer. Shock isn’t an end in itself; it’s a question about how to represent a difficult thing.
Curated by Lisa Botti with director Klaus Biesenbach, the artist’s presentation as this year’s winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie will bring Him into conversation with a range of his works from different periods—sidestepping, it appears, the recent landmark pieces that have over-written his legacy in the public imagination. The show will include the earlier Novecento, 1997, a taxidermied racehorse like an inverted, abject equestrian monument, suspended by rope from the ceiling; and last year’s marble eagle Bones, which does not soar or perch, a watchful or imperious symbol of national or military pride, but instead lies on the ground dead or defeated. Considering his range of fraught objects, made three decades apart, Cattelan says, “I’ve always been interested in figures of authority and what happens when their certainty begins to crack. That has not disappeared.”
Botti also shares that Cattelan will show a new site-specific work, positioned at the exhibition’s entrance, which is based on an important local monument. In Berlin, “history remains visible,” Cattelan reflects. “You encounter it everywhere, in the architecture, the institutions, and even in the spaces between buildings.” It’s the true-enough but generic answer you get when you cannot prod someone in person for detail, from an artist hesitant to foreclose potential meanings. “The political climate gives that conversation a new urgency,” he writes, “but the questions remain familiar: authority, memory, fear, and belonging.”
I press Gioni—who curated the fourth Berlin Biennial in 2006 with Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, and from 1997 until that year, functioned as a surrogate for the artist, granting interviews in his place—for something less vague on Cattelan’s involvement with the city. “Berlin had an important role in Maurizio’s imagination, both as an artist and a curator. And certainly, we thought a lot about absence and the history of that absence very specifically,” Gioni says, making explicit reference to both the Holocaust and the former GDR as we talk, clarifying that he is speaking as himself, not the artist. (Cattelan tells me, of his collaborative approach to PR with Gioni and others, “Every impersonator described a different version of me, and none of them was entirely wrong. After a while, the question is no longer which version is accurate, but why certain versions survive.”)
The curatorial trio dispersed the 2006 exhibition along the length of Auguststrasse, with a church at one end and a cemetery at the other, in Berlin’s gentrifying Mitte. They staged works in rented apartments, offices, and stables, as well as a former Jewish girls’ school—used as a Nazi deportation center in 1942—with a beeping metal detector at the entrance. Echoing a tension in Cattelan’s individual practice, Gioni mentions that the biennial’s denouement was something of a twist for observers who’d been following their process.
“I’ve always been interested in figures of authority and what happens when their certainty begins to crack. That has not disappeared.” —Maurizio Cattelan
In advance of the exhibition, “we opened a shitty little gallery that we called ‘Gagosian Gallery,’ where we did shows,” Gioni recalls, “and that fomented the idea that our biennial was going to be very ironic and funny. It was a big surprise because obviously the show was far from being a joke.”(In 2024, the real Gagosian mounted Cattelan’s first solo gallery show in more than two decades.)
Site was also a key consideration for Cattelan 25 years ago, when Him was first conceived for an exhibition in Sweden. “I thought of the country’s ambivalent position during World War II: it was the right place for a difficult work,” he has written; Sweden’s official position—a stance of neutrality—could stand as a metaphor for art institutions today, with their political balancing acts in a time of genocide.
You might recall the Neue Nationalgalerie’s own high-profile debacle during the opening night of Nan Goldin’s retrospective in late 2024: A public “disagreement” was awkwardly staged between the artist, who spoke to condemn Germany’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza and the censorship of artists critical of Israel, and Biesenbach, who tried to issue an institutional disclaimer of sorts, over the chanting of Goldin’s supporters. “Never again means never again for everyone,” the artist asserted, laying bare a terrible irony of German memory culture which entangles a special obligation to remember the Holocaust, and to guard against antisemitism, with fealty to the Israeli state.
Cattelan mentions “memory” as a theme to me only in passing and in abstract terms. The exhibition text on the Neue Nationalgalerie website as of June was only slightly less hazy. “In the German context, where modes of remembrance are currently being renegotiated, Cattelan’s work acquires renewed relevance,” it read. But Botti, in her reply to me, does let on—with understandable curatorial caution—that Cattelan has transformed the upper hall of the Mies van der Rohe-designed building “into a space that evokes the atmosphere of a church or secular sanctuary, a setting in which visitors are invited to reflect not only on specific historical events but also on the broader structures through which societies remember.”
The artist likewise hints that the Neue Nationalgalerie’s architecture was a primary consideration. “Like all great buildings, it already contains an idea of the world,” Cattelan says of the iconic, transparent box. “The glass suggests transparency and freedom, but it also exposes everything that enters,” he continues, almost ominously. His treatment of Mies’s austere pavilion sounds somber, reverential, but I recall the artist’s transformative treatment of that other jewel of Modernist design, Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral ramp at the Guggenheim, when viewers could peruse the precise mess he made from a career’s worth of work, strolling up or down memory lane. And I’m reminded that he was—long before the toilet and that banana—the art world’s foremost practitioner of the dead-serious prank.
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