This year’s Preis der Nationalgalerie (Prize of the National Gallery), administered by Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, has been awarded to artist Maurizio Cattelan.
Every two years, the prize goes to an influential contemporary artist, who receives a solo exhibition of their work at the German institution. Cattelan was selected by a jury of international directors, which included Emma Lavigne of the Pinault Collection in Paris; Sam Keller of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland; and Klaus Biesenbach of the Neue Nationalgalerie.
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Cattelan’s practice ranges from sculpture to installation to the conceptual, but is characterized by sharp wit and biting social commentary. Among his most iconic works are Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite in La Nona Ora (1999), the golden toilet America (2016), and a duct-taped banana titled Comedian (2019). (The latter work made headlines when it sold at auction last year, while America will be sold by Sotheby’s later this month.) In 2024, he was commissioned to do the Vatican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The shock value and blatant irreverence of his practice often raise questions of morality, power, and values that are pivotal to our time, often in an accessible yet enigmatic way.
Cattelan returns to Berlin, where he cocurated the 4th edition of the Berlin Biennale in 2006, for his solo exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie during Berlin Art Week, which will open in September 2026. It will be curated by Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, a curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and will be commemorated with a ceremony.
“Twenty years on, a solo exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie offers an opportunity to revisit and reflect on this formative influence within a new social and cultural context,” the jury said in a statement. To address “concerns that resonate with particular force in Berlin, a city profoundly shaped by its complex history.”
They continued, “In a time of increasing political polarization, his art can encourage us to view remembrance not as compulsion or obligation, but as a vital and relevant engagement with the present and the future. Cattelan’s ironic questioning of authority and ‘truth’ also carries particular urgency today. At a moment when institutions — museums, politics and the media — are re-evaluating their credibility and social roles, he scrutinizes structures of power both within and beyond the art world, always without a moralizing tone.”
Adding, “He reminds us that provocation and wit are not expressions of cynicism but forms of resistance and constructive reflection.”
The prize’s 2024 iteration was awarded, for the first time, to the four artists Pan Daijing, Daniel Lie, Hanne Lippard, and James Richards.
