Berlin Gallery Weekend is more than just finding out whether that artist friend of a friend is any good, or a chance to down as many free drinks as possible while you bounce from show to show. Yes, it’s fun to eavesdrop on people’s commentary, chart your spring/summer outfit inspiration from the other visitors, and to redevelop your own sense of taste by the end of the weekend. You can style that piece you’ve been waiting for the right event to show off or join from the park half-way buzzed; get lost for hours in one collection or gallery hop your way across the city for two days straight.
But the best thing about gallery weekend is how Berlin becomes a shifting labyrinth of secret venues to discover, new people to meet, and neighbourhoods to explore. Passageways to an Innenhof you would have walked right past the day before are suddenly sounding with music, chatter, and clinking wine glasses. Galleries are hidden like easter eggs in Berlin’s churches, abandoned bunkers, and tucked away courtyards. On usually sleepy streets, doors open in glass storefronts you never noticed and sidewalks are clumped with strangers who just passed through the exhibition.
To save you some time so you can spend it wisely, SLEEK has picked 10 galleries that will keep you on a sure course through Berlin Gallery Weekend.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay. "Element Blau", 1963, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner.
Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner
Since its foundation in 1911, Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner has been a hub in the art market, dedicated to quality curation, scientific accuracy, and careful presentation of their renowned artists. Alongside a collection of early modernist and post-war paintings, the gallery also publishes a regular scholarly catalogue. Mainly German and French artists are featured, a range of Expressionists, post-Impressionists, Surrealists, and members of Die Brücke group.
For Berlin Gallery Weekend, Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner is exhibiting a number of their heavy-hitters: from Willi Baumeister’s African-influenced abstract paintings to the “chromatic constructivism” of Ernst Wilhelm Nay to late works of the Informel artist K.O. Gotz.
April 26-28 2024
Fasanenstraße 72, 10719 Berlin
Liu Yujia. Mushrooms, 2023 (still). Image courtesy of the artist.
Sprüth Magers
For this edition of Berlin Gallery Weekend, Sprüth Magers has curated their first group exhibition focusing exclusively on female Asian artists. “Territory” is meant to question our collective definitions of borders, boundaries, space and the effect that these limitations have on physical and psychological terrain.
The five artists created an interdisciplinary, audio-visual and olfactory exhibition that examines restraints on the body created by language, memories of history, and morality. Galas Porras-Kim studies natural demolition processes on a concrete installation, which stands alongside another project in a state of destruction— Tan Jing’s crumbling tiles, made of plaster and ground-up spices, emitting a scent of plant life native to Thailand.
Two short films by Liu Yuija are shown in the same space, depicting a natural choreography of insects, mushrooms, and human beings interacting in the Changbai Mountain region. Mire Lee’s kinetic sculptures and noise music and Zhang Ruyi’s paintings and organic installations occupy the upper level of the gallery.
April 26- June 29th
Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin
Gabriel Chaile, Installatoin view of "No se me quita lo naco" at meridiano, Puerto Escondido, 2023. Image courtesy of Gabriel Chaile, Lisbon.
Chert Lüdde
Located on the grounds of an old costume and party decoration shop, Chert Lüdde has had no shortage of colour, design, or talent since its opening in 2008. Its curators are interested in storytelling and a narrative approach to art, to no surprise selecting artists Sofia Salazar Rosales and Gabriel Chaile, each for their second time at the gallery. Rosales summarises the inspiration for her artistic work in the title: “The Desire to Dance with Someone Who Is Not Here”. Exploring her Ecuadorian and Cuban heritage, the artist’s sculptural works are imagined as two bodies interconnected in motion— intertwined in a dance.
Alongside the Rosales, Buenos Aires and Lisbon based artist Gabriel Chaile created an adobe bas-relief installation of Argentinian tapir, developing upon his focus in the indigenous cultures of Northeast Argentina.
April 26-July 20 (Chaile) and Aprile 26-June 22 (Rosales)
Gallery Weekend Hours: Friday 6-9pm, Saturday 11-am to 7pm, Sunday 11am-6pm
Hauptstraße 18, 10827 Berlin
Ed Van Der Elsken. Vali Myers, Paris, Saint Germain des Prés, 1951. Image courtesy of Kicken Berlin.
Kicken Berlin
Kicken Berlin commemorates its 50th anniversary with “50 Years | 50 Photographs”, a collection of different photographic movements, from Pictorialism to Bauhaus to New Vision, curated by the gallery’s founding partner Wilhelm Schürman. Featuring works by renowned photographers like Andre Kertész, Werner Manz, and Helga Paris, the exhibition reflects five decades of commitment to contemporary developments in photography since the gallery’s foundation. Spanning the early works of Czech experimental photographer Jaromír Funke’s shadowgraphs, Werner Mantz’s study of modern architectures in the German Rhineland, and the Pictorialist still life series of Josef Sudek, the exhibition explores the medium of the camera itself through the lenses of Europe’s greatest modern photographers.
April 26- Dec 20th
Gallery Weekend Hours: Friday 6-9pm, Saturday 11-am to 7pm, Sunday 11am-6pm
Kaiserdamm 118, 14057 Berlin
Heiner Franzen, "ANCHORS", Installation shot AM SEEGARTEN, 2023. Image courtesy of Am Seegarten and EBENSPERGER.
EBENSPERGER
For Gallery Weekend Berlin, EBENSPERGER will stage four solo exhibitions between two unique venues: a retired chapel in Moabit and the historic monument Fichtebunker in Kreuzberg. Creating a scandal in DDR Berlin with the unapologetic realism of her photo series, Gundula Schulze Edlowy photographed workers and the marginalised of socialist society. Her “Aktportraits” will be displayed at the EBENSPERGER chapel alongside the abstract prosthetic model “Passstücke” of the late sculptor Franz West.
In Kreuzberg, Heiner Franzen and Harry Hachmeister occupy the physical and sonic space of the colossal gasometer and former air-raid shelter Fichtebunker. Franzen’s videowork “ANCHORS” was amassed from international news programmes for over 10 years, edited to focus on the moments of silence during broadcast. Also picking up on the theme of tension and fragility in human experience, Harry Hachmeister uses an array of mediums— ceramics, painting and drawing, and photography— for his installation in the Fichtebunker.
April 26- June 15 (Fichtebunker) and April 26-28 (EBENSPERGER Chapel)
Fichtebunker: Fichtestrasse 6, 10967 Berlin
EBENSPERGER Kappelle: Waldstrasse 52, 10551 Berlin
Barbara Hammer, Pools, 1981, video still. Image courtesy of Estate of Barbara Hammer and KOW, Berlin.
KOW
Providing one of the weekend’s smaller venues, KOW will present a group work titled “I’ll Remember April” alongside two new films by video artist Clemens von Wedemeyer. In addition to the estates of Barbara Hammar, Sandra Brandeis Crawford and others, international artists Anna Boghiguian, Alice Creischer, Eugenio Dittborn and Sophie Gogl will present a translation of memory and narrative into physical reality in a mixed-media installation.
Clemens von Wedemeyer’s first film “Social Geometries” is an abstract animation that imagines social structures as replicating the constellations and patterns of digital network forms. His second work “Surface Composition” also tracks systems of human networking by visiting real world sites, documenting the headquarters of Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Space X.
April 26- June 29th
Lindenstrasse 35, 10969 Berlin
Editions and Multiples 1990-2000, Installation view, Klosterfelde Edition Hamburg, December 2000- January 2001. Image courtesy of Klosterfelde Edition.
Klosterfelde Edition
Celebrating its 35th anniversary, Klosterfelde Edition is showcasing works from its foundation in 1989 until present. “More than once” is a multimedia collection from the works of various artists, including eccentric performance and surreal installation artist John Bock, videographer Christian Jankowski, and painter Rosemarie Trockel. Klosterfelde Edition’s exhibition focuses on the practice of creating multiples and editions of artwork, attributing to the medium of editions the democritization of art in the modern world.
April 26-June 1
Potsdamer Straße 97, 10785 Berlin.
Charlie Stein. Portrait (Shoulder), 2024, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Charlie Stein.
roam
Brutalist gallery space roam is hosting a two person exhibition, bringing together for the first time the figurative paintings of Charlie Stein and Jorinde Voigt’s abstract sculpture work. “Recombining Realities” is partly a meta project about the collaboration between the artists and the process of combining their own notions of reality. Challenging the divergence between their two fields of work, the artists decided to create something that blended the boundaries between abstract and figurative art, as well as the binaries of the body. The resulting work takes the form of paintings depicting glossy, melting latex suits and an installation of geometric, multi-plane sculptures.
April 26-28
Gallery Weekend Hours: Friday, 6-9pm, Saturday 3-7 pm and Sunday 11am-6pm
Lindenstraße 91, 10969 Berlin
Image courtesy of UDK Halbhaus.
UDK Halbhaus x Kleine Humboldt Galerie
As a part of the adjacent “Celery Weekend”, which gathers artist project spaces that are not on the program for official Gallery Weekend, Kleine Humboldt Galerie has curated an exhibition with UDK students, titled “Truth or Dare”. The collaboration poses the question: “What shapes my Truth, and how does it Dare me to act?” 11 artists have come together under the mission of answering this question, in a series of performances and visual artwork, meant to confront the struggle between identity and conformity, interaction and repression. Interpreting their own perspective of reality, artists Marco Siciliano, Mina Büker, Florine Kirby, Linus Beckmen and others will play the game of truth and dare with their own artwork.
April 26-28
Gallery Weekend Hours: Friday 6-10pm, Saturday 1-8pm, Sunday 1-7pm.
Potsdamer Straße 120, 10785 Berlin.
Helen Chadwick. "In the Kitchen (Stove)", 1977. Image courtesy of Société, Berlin.
Société
Société will display an oil painting series by Trisha Baga alongside video and photographic works of the late conceptual artist Helen Chadwick. Both bodies of work explore the process of artistic translation and visual-verbal associations: Chadwick by way of referencing femme-associated objects, like kitchen appliances and bedroom furniture, and Baga through painting intimate household spaces and the inside of their studio. Trisha Baga’s “Contact” series replicates telescopic images of space, zoomed in celestial bodies and myriad tiny points of light, cast over forms of everyday life: pipes and wooden scaffolding open a rift in a galaxy teeming with multi-colored stars, a blackhole gapes beside a mousepad. Their exhibition examines the human task of discovery and interpretation of the natural world, and the juxtaposition between minute human subjectivity and the vastness of the universe.
From the estate of Helen Chadwick, Société has resurrected one of her early video performances: “Domestic Sanitation”. The video is a parody of women’s domestic and beauty rituals, with Chadwick and her friends donning latex bodysuits, fake pubic hair, and costumes that transform them into pieces of furniture. Accompanying the video, a photo series “In the Kitchen ” features self-portraits of the artist in sculpture-outfits of dishwashers, refrigerators, and washing machines.
April 26-July 6
Wielandstrasse 26, 10707 Berlin
Image courtesy of Jonathan Joosten.
KUNSTRAUM:
Another Celery Weekend addition at KUNSTRAUM will feature UDK student Jonathan Joosten, for his project “TRADING POSTModernity”. The artist overlooks no materials in his projects, using a stretcher and wood-chip wallpaper as frame and canvas, office furniture, stills from films and video media. Joosten is interested in exploring the concept of modernity as “the now” but also as inherently defined by history. Inspired by reflexive and self-referential movements of culture in graffiti, advertisement and architecture, the artist draws from everyday references and presents them in abstraction. His large scale metal, wood, and print installation fills the space of KUNSTRAUM’s upper gallery, and works both as a study of space and as an visual playground for visitors to navigate.
April 26-May 4
KUNSTRAUM Potsdamerstrasse 65-67
Parking garage in the courtyard
10785 Berlin
Thijs Biersteker with his intallation for the Carte Blanche theme "Conversations with Nature". Image courtesy of Ruinart.
Am Tacheles
Historic champagne house Ruinart continues to patronize the arts with its sponsorship project “Carte Blanche”, running since 2008. This year, the Carte Blanche featured six different artists for the interdisciplinary project “Conversations With Nature”. The artworks are intended to promote closer engagement with sustainability practices and awareness about climate change. From the works of Thijs Biersteker‘s sensor installation that allows you to see the sap flow of a tree in real time to Henrique Oliveira‘s vine-shaped large scale sculpture, the group of international artists have come togethre under a common mission. To spread awareness about climate change and to bridge the gap between humans and the natural world, to make something with that is relatable and tangible, like nature itself.
April 25-29
Am Tacheles, Oranienburgerstrasse 54 Berlin Mitte.