Berlin’s seasons are a study in contrast, with the grey drab of winter giving way to lush greenery. As the weather relents and trees bloom, Berliners and visitors alike can expect another year of must-see shows at Gallery Weekend Berlin, which runs May 2nd–4th. This year’s 21st edition is set to officially open just one day after International Workers’ Day on May 1st, a national holiday. This means those days are likely to be even more packed than usual, both in and out of the gallery circuit.
The official program boasts 52 participating galleries presenting over 80 artists’ work across 59 locations. And the city’s rebellious streak lives on with a constellation of off-program exhibitions and performances to catch, including Konzulát Studio’s pop-up group show “Civic Servant,” featuring haunting works by avant-garde artists and designers Hannah Rose Stewart, Finley Jay Stewart, and Collezione Nancy Delroi. Gallery crawlers will have a buffet of options, with a potent mix of blue-chip art superstars like Monica Bonvicini at Capitain Petzel, and radical young talent like Puppies Puppies, whose new show “Degenerate Art (Transsexual)” at Trautwein Herleth references everything from Minimalism and Pop Art to the gay hookup app Grindr.
Below, we’ve selected eight standout shows from this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend.
Cyprien Gaillard, “Retinal Rivalry”
Sprüth Magers
May 3–July 26
The “white cube” of the gallery space becomes a multisensory experience in French media artist Cyprien Gaillard’s transformative new show. The exhibition will span new film and sculpture works, most notably Retinal Rivalry (2024), a 30-minute-long video shot in 4K at an ultra-smooth 120 frames per second. In this work, the artist draws on the neurological phenomenon called “perceptual oscillation,” caused by conflicting visual input to each eye. The camera switches between scenes of the city and countryside to show the impact of time on Germany. Here, the hiking grounds of Saxony give way to cavernous Roman ruins beneath a 1970s parking area under the Cologne Cathedral—and even a Burger King housed in a former power substation and Nazi rally ground. These tableaus are almost devoid of people, focusing instead on the spaces themselves and the meaning they accrue through the passage of time.
Alongside this hypnotic meditation on past and present, the show includes Penombra (2024), a small-scale wall sculpture of a sun shade found on antique Italian ATMs, and new works made from reclaimed satin acoustic panels salvaged from the Museo Revoltella, a modern art museum in Trieste, Italy. Once touched by thousands of fingertips, the panels are embroidered with mythological “dance of death” imagery that evokes the impermanence of life.
Tony Cragg, “Sculptures and Drawings”
Buchmann Galerie
May 2–June 21
For his 28th solo exhibition at Buchmann Galerie, Turner Prize–winning artist Tony Cragg offers a rare look into the full scope of his creative process. Cragg is known for his lifelong exploration of the tension between organic forms and industrial materials, leading him to craft key pieces like It Is, It Isn’t (2016) and Double Take (2014), two works that mimic the abstraction of the natural world through the use of bronze and wood. This show features a selection of large-scale sculptures from his “Industrial Nature” series alongside more than 250 drawings, tracing his creative process from sketch to sculpture. The accompanying works on paper aren’t merely blueprints, but essential artifacts of the “visual language” that guides him.
His renowned sculptural works, crafted from bronze, wood, and steel, twist like tendrils mid-metamorphosis. These hulking forms are sometimes smooth and polished, sometimes weathered and textured. Taken together, the works reassert the role of the human hand in creating art, offering a timely meditation on originality for an increasingly AI-obsessed world.
“Reverse Alchemy: Dubuffet, Basquiat, Nava”
Pace Gallery with Galerie Judin
May 2–June 14
International mega-gallery Pace recently announced its first permanent space in Berlin at Die Tankstelle, a 1950s-era gas station-turned-gallery in Schöneberg shared with Galerie Judin. It’s a big vote of confidence in Berlin’s art scene from the leading international gallery as it celebrates its 65th anniversary. The space will host shows from both galleries alternately: Pace’s inaugural exhibition during Gallery Weekend brings together works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Nava. Anchored in Dubuffet’s celebration of “art brut”—meaning works created by people outside the established cultural mainstream—the show celebrates raw, crude, and unfiltered explorations of mark-making.
Late drawings by Dubuffet and early works by Basquiat from the 1980s are presented alongside Nava’s recent works on paper, revealing a throughline of irreverence and anti-establishment energy spanning generations. It’s a strong statement for the bold new exhibition space. Meanwhile, visitors will find a decidedly kinkier approach to the medium in Galerie Judin’s series of works on paper by famed erotica artist Tom of Finland.
Leilah Babirye, “Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque / Die prächtige Groteske)”
Galerie Max Hetzler
May 1–June 4
Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye celebrates queer resilience for her debut solo show in Berlin, rendering the personal strikingly political. “Ekimyula Ekijjankunene (The Gorgeous Grotesque)” spans two of Galerie Max Hetzler’s spaces and features works on paper alongside new sculptural pieces. In this dual show, a series of small ceramics are lined up side-by-side on a plinth in Abambowa (Royal Guard Who Protects the King) (2025), in the gallery’s smaller space in Bleibtreustraße 15/16. The work’s title references the highest guard in Buganda, a pre-colonial kingdom of Uganda. Adorned with bicycle chains and rusted found objects, the works turn these discarded materials into ceremonial forms and emblems of queer resistance.
In a set of works on paper shown in Max Hetzler’s space in Goethestraße 2/3, Babirye depicts people from queer and trans communities that she noticed during her travels, sketched from memory. Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card) (2025) depicts these individuals in vibrant color. Rooted in history and the artist’s lived experience, the exhibition offers a touching tribute to chosen family, survival, and sovereignty.
Frank Auerbach, “Frank Auerbach”
Galerie Michael Werner
May 2–June 28
For the first time since fleeing Berlin as a child in the Holocaust, the German-born British painter Frank Auerbach returns to the city as part of a major new retrospective curated by longtime collaborator and former Whitechapel Gallery director Catherine Lampert. The show spans six decades of work, bringing together both paintings and drawings with key loans from public and private collections, including self-portraits from the last decade and works produced in the years before Auerbach’s death in 2024.
In other, earlier works, figures and shapes emerge from thick impasto like unearthed memories. These paintings of London cityscapes and portraits of Auerbach’s wife and son are the result of the artist’s ritualistic process of painting, scraping, and repainting the canvas. Auerbach’s relentless search for emotional and formal truth is on full display here, offering a response to the question that shaped his career: How do you capture a fleeting moment without betraying it?
Sebastian Jefford, “Toy”
Galerie Noah Klink
May 2–May 31
Life cycle of a maggot, 2021
Sebastian Jefford
Galerie Noah Klink
The works of Berlin-based artist Sebastian Jefford always feel a few degrees off balance, as if beamed in from a slightly skewed alternate reality. For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Noah Klink, Jefford presents plasticized wall sculptures and a series of sequential drawings that seem to throw educational imagery into a microwave, warping it beyond recognition.
In one series of looming polyurethane works, the artist portrays comically haggard, moon-like faces. These worn-out expressions are offset by the tiny, boyish faces stuck to their large noses. Accompanying drawings borrow the structure of diagrams and comic strips: slapstick imagery collides with impending dread. For example, in Choo choo, choo choo (2025), a salivating mouth is fed spoonfuls of breakfast cereal from an anonymous hand in a comic strip–style work. Later panels of the drawing reveal that the mouth is attached to a man tied down to a chair and fed by a giant woman. The dire sequence evokes the endless repetitive consumption of media. Across the exhibition, Jefford pokes fun at the contemporary rules and systems that order our lives, in which logic and meaning often seem just out of grasp.
Sun Yitian, “Romantic Room”
Esther Schipper
May 2–May 31
Jingpin, 2024
Sun Yitian
Esther Schipper
For her first Berlin solo show, “Romantic Room,” Sun Yitian presents vibrant new paintings that reconfigure Eastern and Western iconography into elaborate visual puzzles. The exhibition takes the Chinese notion of “Shanzhai”—used to designate creative transformation through appropriation and counterfeit goods—as a touchstone. Her works, drawing on art history, mass production, amusement parks, and religious iconography, critique Western narratives through the lens of Chinese consumer culture. In particular, she’s inspired by the economic boom of her youth in Wenzhou, a manufacturing hub that churned out inexpensive toys and knockoffs.
In her large painting, Jinpin (2024), a pale blue high heel in the shape of a fish stands out amongst the muted brown tree trunks and inky black night sky, while the smaller work, Shelter VI (2024), presents a ghostly white inflatable fortress displaced under a sliver of moon. There’s a dreamlike quality to the Renaissance-inspired compositions and their muted palettes; the objects in her scenes are hyperreal, yet menacing, as if you’ve stumbled across something you shouldn’t see.
Maud Paul, “Triangled Thoughts”
Better Go South
May 2–May 30
Feed yourself, 2025
Maud Paul
Better Go South
Maud Paul aims to bring feeling to furniture. For the French-born, Brussels-based artist and designer, the trick is balancing polished precision—utilizing materials like steel, mesh and textile—with a quiet sensuality. In her first solo show of sculptures and drawings, “Triangled Thoughts,” the 26-year-old artist turns Better Go South’s Berlin gallery into a space of gentle resistance. Curved metal seating wrapped in soft textiles invite the body to rest, while a series of color-pencil drawings evoke quiet domestic moments. The works are united by the alluring geometry of a triangle and its symbolism as a means of stability—something in short supply in our modern world.
Trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and shaped by time in the studios of German artist-designer Valentin Loellmann, Paul brings the precision of furniture design to her art practice, imbuing her work with both craft and care.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/Uad1h0W
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