Unlike most major art cities, Berlin doesn’t have its own dedicated international art fair – no vast conference hall packed with galleries and collectors in slightly grubby, champagne-drenched exchanges of money. They’ve tried a few times, but it never really worked. Instead, the city has something far more elegant: Gallery Weekend. The city’s three-day art orgy pulls collectors and art lovers from around the world, as galleries roll out their top artists and spruce up the walls (maybe even update their websites) in a thrilling moment of collective cultural alignment. Of course, not all galleries are invited – it’s the art world, after all. Only around fifty make the cut, but the focus remains squarely on Berlin’s gallery scene. Here are a few events to watch out for.
May 1-3, various locations.
Mitte
At Galerie EIGEN + ART, South African painter Brett Charles Seiler presents new paintings in his distinctive, pongy bitumen paint. Titled occasional lovers, the solo exhibition draws on personal mythologies and queer identity in his potent, strangely intimate canvases.
Nearby, Sprüth Magers hosts Martine Syms, transforming the street-facing space into a pop-up boutique of artworks, purchasable merchandise and publications, continuing her interest in the shop as performance and her exploration of Blackness in visual culture.
Meanwhile, DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM show the young visual artist Monty Richthofen. In HARD 2 4GET, spray-painted vehicles bearing his abstract text compositions will circulate through the city, passing through places like Strausberger Platz before slipping back into everyday traffic: an intriguing, if self-consciously futile warning against the normalisation of war.
At Capitain Petzel, Berlin-born painter Stefanie Heinze presents new works in her now familiar mode: exuberant compositions where cartoonish figures, warped bodies and shifting landscapes fold into dreamlike scenes – delicately balanced between humour and unease.
Kreuzberg
EBENSPERGER presents the work of Göksu Kunak, a queer, anti-fascist performer exploring identity and constructed narratives across choreography, installation and text – and it’s a good excuse to visit the gloomy, damp interior of the Fichtebunker.
Schöneberg
At ChertLüdde, Petrit Halilaj arrives still glowing from his expansive presentation at the Hamburger Bahnhof, bringing his usual mix of tenderness and fragile beauty. After stage sets made from shipping containers were vandalised ahead of a planned opera in his Kosovan homeland, he recreates them here, drawing on memory, migration and personal mythology.
Around Kurfürstendamm, Galerie Molitor shows the much-hyped photographic experiments of Georgian artist Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, while directly opposite, at KOW, the outspoken, uncompromising Candice Breitz presents a new body of work.
Over at Galerie Judin, in the competitive Mercatorhöfe, Jorinde Voigt and Michael Sailstorfer feature in a presentation that mops up a number of former König Galerie artists.
Also On
Positions Art Fair at Flughafen Tempelhof also runs alongside the weekend, and don’t miss Sellerie Weekend, the sister festival devoted to Berlin’s rich ecosystem of project spaces.
