“Seasons” is the exhibition by Maurizio Cattelan that will open on 7 June at Gamec, the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bergamo. On display are five works, including pieces created specifically for the city and key icons from his past production. It is an exhibition by the most famous living Italian artist, the man who, more than anyone else, embodies the paradox of contemporary art.

Art critic Stefano Chiodi opens La bellezza difficile (Difficult Beauty) – a book published in 2008 – with a harsh reflection: in Italian art, from the 1990s onwards, everything has changed: impotence has taken centre stage. The artists who are now making a name for themselves enter the art world on tiptoe – they embody the very opposite of the attributes that history seemed to have assigned them: originality, drama, masculinity and, above all, power.

For Chiodi, Maurizio Cattelan is a necessary step in this paradigm shift. A child in a suit and tie who claims he cannot be like grown-ups; an artist who constantly emphasises that he cannot (no longer) make it. As in La rivoluzione siamo noi (2000), where he portrays himself as a puppet hanging from a coat rack wearing Joseph Beuys' famous grey felt suit, or in Senza Titolo (2001), when his head pops out of a hole in the floor of a museum. Cattelan seems to repeat incessantly: I shouldn't be here.

Maurizio Cattelan – born in Padua in 1960 – is the most famous Italian artist on the international scene, but he cannot (or does not want to) be an artist – at least not in the terms in which the world thinks of artistry. And this ambivalence is central to the exhibition he has just opened at the Gamec in Bergamo.

“Seasons” is the title of the exhibition project, divided into four stages across the Lombard city. It begins in the Sala delle Capriate of the Palazzo della Ragione, in the heart of Bergamo Alta: a noble floor of one of the oldest municipal buildings in Italy, which houses, among other things, frescoes by Bramante. The hall chosen by Cattelan is where justice was administered: a place where one feels alone, crushed by the weight of power. The artist responds to this weight with November (2023), a statue of a homeless man carved from the same rationalist marble that, even in the “city of the Thousand” (la Città dei Mille), bears traces of Mussolini's past.

Two works are on display at Gamec's historic headquarters. The first, Empire (2025), created specifically for the exhibition curated by Cattelan himself together with Marta Papini, is a terracotta brick engraved with the word “empire”: a symbol of crystallised dissent, of a nominal revolution that never comes to fruition. The second is a 2021 reinterpretation of the controversial sculpture Him: Adolf Hitler as a child kneeling in prayer, this time with his face covered.

Outside the museum, a “public” work completes and updates the monument to Garibaldi in the Rotonda dei Mille. One (2025) is “the one”, the child who surprises the unifier of Italy from behind. He pretends to have a gun in his hand, and it is unclear whether he is pointing it for fun or because he does not really know what to do with the symbolic legacy received from previous generations.

The common thread linking the five works is the figure of the eagle, which also features on the exhibition poster. Cattelan found it in the city archives: it was a monument commemorating a speech given by Mussolini in 1919 to workers in Dalmine, a town on the outskirts of Bergamo. In some ways, this eagle echoes one of Cattelan's most famous exhibitions, the one at the Pirelli HangarBicocca a few years ago, which was literally filled with pigeons – an animal that is increasingly popular in contemporary art.

Cattelan's eagle is a different animal, less divine, less imperial, more fragile. As is often the case in his work, it is closer to the ground than to the sky. The last work in the exhibition – installed in the former Oratory of San Lupo thanks to the collaboration with the Adriano Bernareggi Foundation and Diocesan Museum – sees the animal, symbol of unspoilt nature, mountain conquest and unbridled imperialism, fall to the ground, wings spread, in front of the city. The reference to Marcel Broodthaers and the Département des Aigles (the Department of Eagles), the most famous section of the fictitious museum with which the Belgian artist occupied the Salle de Marbre of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels to denounce the relationship between art, power and the market, is clear.

Cattelan's intervention is the fourth phase of a broader cultural programme that, since May 2024, has accompanied Gamec through a period of transition: the institution is changing its physical location and, with it, its curatorial direction. “Pensare come una montagna” (Thinking like a mountain) takes the museum's activities outside its traditional spaces and into the Bergamo province, with a particular focus on the Alpine region. So much so that, once Cattelan's work is complete, it will be possible to see the progress of the reconstruction of the historic Aldo Frattini bivouac in Valbondione, redesigned by EX. Andrea Cassi and Michele Versaci: for a while, it will be the museum's “home at high altitude”.

The exhibition closes with a roadside poster campaign, which also involves the portals of the “red wall”, Jean Nouvel's kilometre-long work that borders Bergamo's Kilometro Rosso Science and Technology Park.

Opening image: Maurizio Cattelan, One, 2025. Courtesy GAMeC