From June 7th to October 26th, 2025, the city of Bergamo hosts Seasons, the highly anticipated Maurizio Cattelan exhibition 2025, presented by GAMeC as part of its experimental biennial program Thinking Like a Mountain. This new project marks the return of one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living artists, known for turning provocation into poetry. Staged across multiple symbolic sites in the city, the exhibition operates as a city-wide narrative, exploring cycles of growth, collapse, and rebirth in personal, political, and collective history.
The exhibition, part of Thinking Like a Mountain, features five powerful installations that blend Cattelan’s signature irony with an unflinching gaze at power and memory. Among them is Bones (2025), the most symbolically charged work in the show. Set within the Ex Oratorio di San Lupo, Maurizio Cattelan’s Bones presents a shattered marble eagle—once a fascist emblem—now lying defeated, its grandeur eroded. With Bones, artist reclaims a forgotten symbol and transforms it into a haunting meditation on the fragility of ideologies. The work is more than a sculpture: it is a confrontation with historical amnesia, and a reminder of the ruins ideology leaves behind.
Across town at GAMeC, Empire (2025) confronts another illusion: revolution. A single brick, trapped inside a glass bottle, becomes a quiet metaphor for thwarted change—utopia bottled up, silenced before it could speak. Next to it stands No (2021), a reworking of the infamous Him. This time, the kneeling figure wears a bag over its head—its identity erased, its presence more unsettling than ever. Censorship and recognition fold into one another, forcing the viewer to question not only who we see, but what we choose to see at all.
In the historic Palazzo della Ragione, November (2023) introduces a new kind of monument: a marble sculpture of a homeless man caught in a moment of bodily vulnerability. Made with the likeness of Lucio, a close collaborator of the artist, the work breaks the silence around marginalization. Here, Cattelan asks: who deserves a monument, and who decides what memory looks like?
The most public—and perhaps most unsettling—work in this Maurizio Cattelan exhibition 2025 is One (2025), located at the Rotonda dei Mille. A child perches atop the statue of Garibaldi, miming a gun with their fingers. The gesture is ambiguous: game or rebellion? innocence or critique? In this collision between monument and counter-monument, Cattelan dismantles old national myths and opens a conversation on generational change, unresolved conflict, and the meaning of unity today.
With Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan continues to disrupt and to listen, reminding us that art isn’t just a mirror—it’s a lever. His sculptures may be silent, but their questions echo loudly across the city.
Photography by LORENZO PALMEIRI