Berlin has at all times managed to outlast proclamations of its alleged endings. A metropolis perpetually declared ‘over’ but stubbornly, if unglamorously, alive. In current months, nonetheless, the obituaries have grown louder and extra insistent. The acquainted critique – {that a} scene constructed on low cost rents and unfastened buildings was by no means meant to final perpetually – has begun to really feel much less like provocation and extra like prognosis. If Berlin’s cultural capital was as soon as buoyed by precarity, that very same situation now threatens to calcify into stagnation.
Then got here every week in late April 2026 that sharpened the temper into one thing more durable to disregard. A number of bulletins landed in fast succession, disparate but entwined of their ‘vote of no confidence’ within the metropolis: collector Julia Stoschek confirmed the closure of her Berlin house come October; Artnet shut its Berlin workplace, efficient instantly; Ryanair introduced its withdrawal from Berlin beginning October, slicing the town off from many direct flights; and the resignation of the town’s tradition senator despatched waves of political tremor by means of its arts infrastructure.
Do not miss Vivien Zhang, Tectonic Burst, 2026, at Max Hetzler
(Picture credit score: © Vivien Zhang, courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa. Photograph: Jack Hems.)
What’s extra, all of this unfolds in opposition to a backdrop of extended fracture. For greater than two years, the town’s artwork scene has been marked by deep polarisation, its communities strained by political and ideological divisions which have reshaped each discourse and collaboration. And but, in a uncommon second of collective stillness, those self same communities not too long ago discovered themselves united in grief, mourning the premature lack of two main artists, Thomas Zipp and Henrike Naumann, whose practices had helped outline Berlin’s modern voice.
And nonetheless, the town’s tried-and-true Gallery Weekend format persists, benefitting this yr from an surprising realignment: now that the skilled preview of the Venice Artwork Biennale moved to early Might, Berlin has by chance grow to be a handy waypoint, particularly for these travelling from Asia. If Gallery Weekend Berlin has at all times functioned as a barometer – of power, of relevance, of hype – then this yr’s version unfolds below a very charged second. The query is now not whether or not the town is altering, however what sort of metropolis it’s turning into, and for whom.
With almost 60 galleries taking part this yr and numerous different openings at establishments and particular places – for instance, a bunch present curated by artist David Douard at Halle am Berghain – the town’s artwork panorama is straddling renewal and returns. The unofficial pre-Gallery Weekend spotlight got here courtesy of Galerie Neu, with new works by painter Sergej Jensen put in in each room of the easy studio house for friends of the KW institute. The town’s previous guard gathered round Jensen’s new figurative work, small canvases that includes characters with clown noses (or canine snouts?). The temper was cheerful and nostalgic, because the promise of early-2000s Berlin flickered throughout guests’ ageing faces. (The present is accessible by appointment solely by means of 30 Might and is effectively well worth the hassle.)
Shinoh Nam, I name my irritating envy Admiration and wrestle to console myself. Victory lies earlier than me but drifts away, amid infinite and forgotten functions, I nonetheless pray others’ lives serve my longing but, 2025 – exhibiting at Mountains
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist.)
Becoming a member of the official programme within the new part for younger galleries known as Views, Mountains gallery enjoys well-deserved recognition after final yr’s extensively mentioned presentation of David Medalla’s works. Now, the gallery returns with Korean artist Shinoh Nam. Titled ‘A Information to the Inside for a Home on Ambiguous Grounds’, the exhibition assembles a vocabulary of fractured architectures as a spatial argument. Nam constructs a fragmented ‘home’ stripped to its ground plan – an open, psychological inside. Metal, glass, and industrial foam are rendered each exacting and unstable, staging a stress between building and collapse. Right here, structure’s promise of progress is recast as websites of contradiction.
A bunch of galleries supply reveals by robust younger voices who’ve captured the market’s consideration not too long ago, together with Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler; Wynnie Mynerva at Sociéte; and Vivian Zhang at Max Hetzler, to call however a number of. At Capitain Petzel, Rodney McMillian buildings his first solo exhibition with the gallery round his new movie, which is anchored in a historic anti-lynching speech by Ida B Wells-Barnett, delivered in 1909 on the inaugural convention of the NAACP. The textual content isn’t handled as archival citation a lot as a residing deal with, spoken into the current tense. McMillian’s new works, in the meantime – sculptures and work from his Black Work sequence – carry palpable weight. What would possibly learn as abstraction insists on its politics, pushing in opposition to the concept of pure type and redirecting consideration to the underlying buildings that form it.
Throughout city in Berlin’s previous West, Galerie Buchholz delivers one other debut – not only for the gallery however for Germany. Japanese artist Yuji Agematsu presents the primary of a two-part exhibition with an set up of his delicate Zips – small, contemplative assemblages constituted of particles collected on every day walks by means of New York. Every fragment is positioned contained in the cellophane of a cigarette packet, turning the missed residue of a single day right into a ritualised document. Put in on customized shelving designed by the artist, the works accumulate right into a quiet calendar of motion and a focus, formed by a follow Agematsu has maintained each day since 1996. The second half, opening later in June, shifts the register solely. It introduces a efficiency by the artist alongside a newly activated set up of 35mm slides, photographed in Marseille in 1994 and now projected into the current.
Yuji Agematsu. Zip: 01-01-2024–12-31-2024, 2024, at Galerie Buchholz
(Picture credit score: Yuji Agematsu. Zip: 01-01-2024–12-31-2024, 2024 (element). Combined media in cigarette pack cellophane wrapper. Photograph Reggie Shiobara. Courtesy of Yuji Agematsu and Galerie Buchholz.)
Sprüth Magers presents a triple invoice: in the principle house, Thomas Demand brings a set of latest works that stretch his long-standing investigation into constructed photographs and their quiet authority. Constructed from paper, cardboard, and meticulous staging, the works reproduce environments that really feel without delay acquainted and estranged. On this new physique of labor, Demand pushes additional into the stress between proof and phantasm. The pictures reinforce their very own sense of absence – no figures, no incident, solely the residue of conditions reconstructed from reminiscence, media, or political imagery. As an illustration, one work returns to a extensively circulated police {photograph} from 2024, the place San Diego authorities intercepted a big cargo of methamphetamine hid as watermelons.
Whereas usually described informally as ‘papier-mâché’, US Customs and Border Safety clarified that the medication had been truly wrapped in green-painted plastic and paper to simulate the fruit. In Demand’s reconstruction, the absurdity of the scene is stripped of forensic urgency and restaged as fastidiously. It’s a picture of concealment that doubles again by itself strategies of fabrication.
Thomas Demand, Cash, 2025, at Sprüth Magers.
(Picture credit score: © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Sprüth Magers.)
In the meantime, Robert Elfgen fills the higher gallery house with lyrical assemblages, work on copper, cements, and wooden, and sculptural interventions that construct total environments moderately than discrete objects. Photos of polluting energy crops and industrial residues sit alongside mythic imagery; animals and imagined types emerge in opposition to landscapes that really feel without delay constructed and remembered.
Within the gallery’s decrease stage, Martine Syms’s contribution takes the type of ‘Dominica Publishing, a short lived boutique’ – a pop-up house that can exist just for the weekend. This try at displaying need additionally discovered expression in her 2024 exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, a multimedia venture that functioned concurrently as paintings and idea retailer. Alongside its retail show logic, the Berlin store consists of works akin to This Is A Studio / Aunty (35) (2023), which pulls on surveillance footage of a late-night police go to exterior the artist’s LA studio. Misunderstandings between officer and artist, spoken over the studio’s safety system, circle uneasy questions on security, belonging and energy. To not be missed.
Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026 runs 1 – 3 Might
