This year the Preis der Nationalgalerie, carried out by the National Gallery in Berlin, was granted to the musician Maurizio Cattelan.
The reward is granted every 2 years to a significant modern musician whose job will certainly be shown in a solo event at a German organization. Cattelan was picked by a global court of supervisors, consisting of Emma Lavigne of the Pinault Collection in Paris; Sam Keller of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland; and Klaus Biesenbach of the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Cattelan’s method varies from sculpture to installment to principle, however is defined by a sharp intelligence and sharp social discourse. Among his most famous jobs is Pope John Paul II’s la nonaola (1999) “Golden Bathroom” United States (2016 ), and a taped banana labelled comic (2019 ). (The latter made headings when it was auctioned in 2014, while United States It will certainly be offered by Sotheby’s later on this month.) In 2024 he was appointed to create the Vatican Structure at the Venice Biennale. His method is shock worth and coldly tongue-in-cheek, commonly questioning of principles, power, and worths that are main to our time in an obtainable yet enigmatic means.
Cattelan went back to Berlin and co-curated the fourth Berlin Biennale in 2006 and had a solo event at the Neues Nationalgalerie throughout Berlin Art Week, opening up in September 2026. The event will certainly be curated by Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, manager of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and will certainly be memorialized with an event.
” Twenty years later on, a solo event at the Neues Nationalgalerie provides a possibility to take another look at and review this developmental impact in a brand-new social and social context,” the court stated in a declaration, dealing with “worries concerning a certain influence on Berlin, a city greatly influenced by its intricate background.”
They proceed: “In a period of raising political polarization, his art can motivate us to see ceremony not as an obsession or responsibility, however as an essential and pertinent interaction with today and the future. Cattelan’s paradoxical doubting of authority and ‘fact’ is specifically immediate today, also. At a minute when establishments such as galleries, national politics, and the media are reassessing their reliability and duty in culture, he analyzes class structure within and outside the art globe, constantly without an academic tone.” “.
Including, “He advises us that justification and ingenuity are not expressions of resentment however kinds of resistance and useful representation.”
In 2024, the honor was granted for the very first time to 4 musicians: Frying pan Daijing, Daniel Leigh, Hanni Lippard and James Richards.


