Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s 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. Speaking on the subterranean level of Mies van der Rohe’s weightless Neue Nationalgalerie (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. There was also the gold toilet, called America, that was installed in New York’s Guggenheim in 2016, its curators later offering the piece to Donald Trump’s White House instead of the Van Gogh that it requested. Thieves later made off with the 18-carat loo when it went on display at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s Oxfordshire birthplace.
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. The problem is people often stop at the joke.” 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. We sleep, we love, we dream, we fear.
It’s a moment where things get fuzzy. And after night, there is dawn and another day. But it’s definitely a suspended moment – a magic moment.” At the entrance, peering down from the roof, the 2003 work Never features Oskar, Günter Grass’s eerie child witness to the Nazi era from his novel The Tin Drum, silently beating out his warning.
Purgatory, created for the show, presents a stunted-scale version of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as an ambivalent landmark, a portal for visitors to rethink their engagement with European history. Him, from 2001, features a diminutive kneeling man who is revealed to be Adolf Hitler in a prayer-like pose, facing off against 2007’s 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 “a menacing presence”, though Botti adds: “It’s also about the holy spirit, about looking up. It’s a bit of optimism.” Then there’s 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. The Hitler piece Him has been Cattelan’s most lucrative, selling for $17.2m in 2016.
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