Maurizio Cattelan: The Serious Artist Behind the $6M Banana and Golden Toilet

Maurizio Cattelan sits in the subterranean galleries of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie and laughs—a big, unguarded sound—when asked which of his works might be stolen, defaced, or eaten. He doesn't need to worry, he says. He's already handled that part. The 60-year-old Italian sculptor, silver-haired and trim, has built a career on the collision between the absurd and the profound, and nowhere is that collision more visible than in Night, his first major solo exhibition in Germany, which opens this fall in one of modernism's most austere buildings.

Cattelan is famous for two things that sound like jokes but aren't. In 2019, he duct-taped a banana to a wall, titled it Comedian, and watched it sell for $6.2 million. The punchline deepened when the buyer ate it. Before that came America, an 18-carat gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim in 2016—a work so literally functional and so obviously luxurious that it seemed to mock the entire enterprise of art collecting. When it traveled to Blenheim Palace, thieves stole it. These pieces made Cattelan a household name, the art world's most accessible provocateur, the guy who proved you could make millions by putting a fruit on a wall. But they also buried him under a reputation he's spent years trying to excavate.

"My work has always been serious," he says flatly. "The problem is people often stop at the joke." Night is his answer to that problem. The exhibition, which won him the Neue Nationalgalerie's annual prize for influential contemporary artists, deliberately excludes his greatest hits. Instead, it assembles three decades of work that grapple with power, memory, and the weight of history—particularly the darkest chapters of European history. At the entrance stands Never, a 2003 piece featuring Oskar, the child witness from Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, silently beating his drum as a warning. Deeper in, visitors encounter Him, a 2001 sculpture of a diminutive man kneeling in prayer. The man is Adolf Hitler. The work sold for $17.2 million in 2016 and sparked fury in Warsaw, where it was displayed on the site of the wartime ghetto, recalling Willy Brandt's famous 1970 act of contrition at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called it "a senseless provocation."

Cattelan doesn't apologize. He argues that Hitler, in his work, is a stand-in for evil itself—it could have been Genghis Khan or any other tyrant. He's unafraid of accusations that he's appropriating German iconography without permission, dismissing such concerns as "very American." What matters to him is that Berlin, a city scarred by history and still carrying its contradictions, is the right place for these works to land. He describes the city as "a sort of outdoor experiment," and he has history here. Twenty years ago, he co-curated the fourth Berlin Biennale, a landmark show that helped define the city's creative renaissance during its "poor but sexy" era. He spent those years clubbing, recovering lost time from his youth—years spent as a postman, a mortuary attendant, a sperm donor. Now, returning to Berlin with Night feels like a homecoming.

The exhibition also includes La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), a 1999 work showing Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, resplendent in ceremonial robes even as he's being obliterated. Overhead hang thousands of stuffed pigeons, which Cattelan describes as "a menacing presence," though curator Lisa Botti reads them differently: as symbols of the holy spirit, as a gesture of looking upward, as a whisper of optimism. This is the texture of Cattelan's work—the way irony and sincerity collapse into each other, the way a laugh can catch in your throat and become something else entirely. Klaus Biesenbach, the gallery's director, calls it "comic existentialism."

Cattelan was born to a working-class family in Padua, 40 kilometers west of Venice, and had no formal art training. He built his career by jumping, as he says, "into the void." The 2010s brought a publicized retirement—he hit a wall, made a drowning sound, raised a white flag—followed by a fierce return. Each major exhibition sends him on a rollercoaster of exhilaration and panic. He admits to being "extremely desperate" while planning Night. "Do I suffer? Yes," he says. "I don't like it. It's always a challenge. I still need the rush. It's a contradiction, but I love the hate of making a show. It's a fix. It's a dependency."

He divides his time between New York and Milan, living under two hard-right governments—Trump's America and Giorgia Meloni's Italy. He watches the resurgence of demands for strong leadership with a kind of grudging fascination, expressing disappointment that the left hasn't produced the stability Meloni has managed. He suspects the answer lies in scapegoats, in the enemies offered to us, in problems we probably don't have. "Nobody has the magic wand," he says. When asked about legacy—whether, in the shadow of David Hockney's death, he's thought about what he'll leave behind—he deflects. He has no foundation, no studio, no family. A legacy, he suggests, would require a kind of self-consciousness he doesn't possess. But now in his sixties, he admits he might need to think about who to pass his problems to. "I'm super lucky," he says. "I did have doubts. But I jumped into the void and said, 'If we overcome fear, there will be a fantastic dawn. A fantastic dawn.'"