Berlin Art Week is back, which officially signals the end of the months of Aperol spritzes, pool trips, and pretending the heat wasn’t unbearable. A slow August can be great, but now it’s time for the city to get back in the groove with some fresh shows. And this year’s return—its 15th edition no less—is not messing around. Big names, rising talent, exhibitions, performances, readings, concerts: If it exists in the art world, it's happening somewhere in Berlin this week.
A few examples to watch out for: Maurizio Cattelan is taking over the Neue Nationalgalerie, his first major solo in Germany, after winning the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2026. At Hamburger Bahnhof, musician and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto is finally getting the retrospective he deserves, a European first for this icon. Meanwhile, Schinkel Pavillon and n.b.k. are joining forces on “Projections Onto the East,” exploring the significance of “East” and “West” as concepts in art. And as the art world returns, it’s also saying goodbye: This week marks the final events at Julia Stoschek Collection’s Berlin location, including a screening by American filmmaker Matt Lambert, and a Spike Art Magazine roundtable on the current state of the arts.
Every year Berlin Art Week has to top what it did last time. This year, it actually might. So to save you from full decision paralysis, here are eight must-see gallery shows to get you started.
“Animal Mirror”
carlier | gebauer
Sep. 10–Nov. 14
Few relationships are as old and as unresolved as the one between humans and animals—throughout human history, animals have been seen as companions and confidants, as well as food sources and sacrificial objects, roles that sit uncomfortably close together. In this show, 15 artists take on that contradiction from very different angles, considering animals as part of a shared ecological and genetic system, cohabitants of the same planet and gene pool, and more closely related to us than most people assume.
For example, Aki Inomata creates semitransparent shells for hermit crabs, built from the shapes the crabs need to survive, unsettling the idea of human authorship outright. Elsewhere, sculptures by the late German artist Lin May Saeed show her lifelong view of animals as our equals, taking on empathy and liberation directly. In these artworks, tenderness and violence, science and myth all come together, coexisting.
“Exquisite Corpse”
Pace Gallery
Sep. 10–Nov. 11
The title of this exhibition suggests something bleaker than what’s on view. The name is rather borrowed from the Surrealist parlor game, in which each player contributes to a drawing of a body while seeing only the fragment left visible by the last person, a fitting structure for a show about how artists absorb influence without ever seeing the full picture. The show is curated by the artist Loie Hollowell, and it began as a personal tribute to her long-running appreciation for Kiki Kogelnik, the Austrian American Pop artist whose influence still rarely gets the credit it deserves. In conversation with two of her contemporaries, Sascha Braunig and Veronika Pausova, Hollowell realized Kogelnik had shaped all of their practices in strikingly similar ways and built the exhibition around that shared, largely unspoken lineage.
Kogelnik’s Cold Passage (1964), where abstract outlines of bodies spread from all sides of the canvas in greens and yellows, serves as a reference point. Hollowell’s Mother Radar in green and orange (2026) shows the most obvious influence, where bodiless arms also reach down from the top of the canvas, to a floating head amid a circular geometric pattern.
Katharina Sieverding
“Life-Death”
Galerie Thomas Schulte
Sep. 11–Nov. 7
Katharina Sieverding, born in Prague in 1944, has spent more than four decades building a body of autobiographical photographic work centered on identity, gender, and her own shifting social role. This show goes back to where that career effectively started: the 1969 film that gives the show its name, a 29-minute work shot on 16mm and shown here alongside large-format stills and previously unpublished Polaroids. It’s early Sieverding, made in West Berlin during a period of concentrated political and aesthetic upheaval, and it marks a shift away from her earlier theatrical training toward the independent visual language that would define everything she made afterward.
The film was significant enough at the time to land Sieverding a place in Documenta 5 three years later, in 1972. She made the film while studying under Joseph Beuys at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, shooting shortly after the academy’s temporary closure during protests she took part in as both documentarian and participant.
The soundtrack deserves its own mention on top of that. An earlier version of the film used spoken text but fell flat; in 1972 it was rescored by the musicians of Kraftwerk, recorded in a single improvised session that catches them mid-transition between rock, experimental sound, and the electronic music they’d soon be known for.
Sabine Moritz
“ROT GELB BLAU STAUB”
Galerie Max Hetzler
Sep. 11–Oct. 31
German painter Sabine Moritz’s first exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler is a substantial one: 12 large canvases in groups of three, her first quadriptych, still life, and a selection of works on paper upstairs spanning 30 years of practice. Born in Quedlinburg, Germany, in 1969, Moritz surfaces her East German childhood directly in her early work: a series of over 100 pencil drawings of the Neulobeda apartment complex, made in the early 1990s and rediscovered in her studio nearly two decades later by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. It’s the same material that runs through the works on paper in this show.
The upper-floor works trace her earlier method—compositions built from photographs and newspaper cuttings. Over the past decade her paintings have shifted toward intuitive, sketch-free abstraction, and the 12 new works follow that path, loosely structured around the elements of fire, air, earth, and water. These four groups of three canvases each carry something of its element in title, palette, and handling.
David Claerbout
“Repose”
Esther Schipper
Sep. 10–Oct. 31
Eagle Eye, 2026
David Claerbout
Esther Schipper
Belgian artist David Claerbout has spent his career playing with time: slowing it down, running it backward, stretching it out until a scene stops feeling like a fixed image and starts to feel alive. His second show with the gallery is staged in a darkened space and brings together four video works, all Berlin premieres, plus a group of related drawings. Walk in and you’ll likely see The woodcarver and the forest (2025) first: a man calmly whittling spoon after spoon, peaceful right up until you notice the forest outside his window is quietly getting smaller with every one he makes. Birdcage (2023) sits nearby, showing the manicured gardens of a stately home taken over by sudden, unexplained violence. Eagle Eye (2026), built from found footage, CGI, and AI, shows a bald eagle strapped to an operating table, awake and staring back, flipping the usual symbol of freedom. And in Backwards Growing Tree (2023), a tree in the Italian countryside, filmed over five years, grows in reverse, so slowly you barely notice something’s wrong.
Three of the four works run for hours or years, not minutes, moving at the pace of something alive rather than a usual film. Budget real time if you want to actually sit with them instead of just walking past.
Ersan Mondtag
“Dispair”
DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM
Sep. 9–Oct. 31
Ersan Mondtag came to international attention with his artwork Monument of an Unknown Man (2024), when he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2024, filling the pavilion with a colossal, multistory labyrinth of cramped rooms coated entirely in somber gray asbestos-like dust. This haunting, immersive environment for performers referenced his own family’s migration history. His first solo show with DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM extends that inquiry into a new medium: He uses memory and the body as a historical archive, to create sculptures made almost entirely of wood. In large sculptures, it’s charred, while elsewhere reliefs combine the material with silicone. The choice is deeply conceptual—burning is destruction and preservation at once, a process that mirrors how memory gets physically carried and altered in the body over time.
Mondtag’s contribution to Art Week doesn’t stop there. Running alongside the exhibition’s opening, the artist also presents Alternde Meister (2026), a performance at the Gemäldegalerie developed with curator Nadim Samman and produced with the Berliner Ensemble theater group. The performance brings a group of aging performers into dialogue with centuries-old paintings, placing their bodies alongside the museum’s collection and creating a brief encounter between theater and art within the gallery spaces.
Xavier Robles de Medina
“SOURCE”
Galerie Noah Klink
Sep. 10–Oct. 10
At Galerie Noah Klink, there’s another gallery debut, and one with a strong personal thread running through it. Born in Suriname in 1990 and now based between his home country and Berlin, Xavier Robles de Medina comes from a family with its own complicated relationship to public history. His grandfather, the sculptor Stuart Robles de Medina, created the 12-foot bronze of former Surinamese prime minister Johan Adolf Pengel that still stands in the capital, Paramaribo’s Independence Square. He was also the one who, on the eve of Surinamese independence in 1975, removed the smaller statue of the Dutch queen Wilhelmina that had also stood in the square. That attention to which figures get memorialized, and which gets quietly forgotten, runs directly through the grandson’s work.
For “SOURCE,” the artist uses a research-driven method, pulling from colonial archives, media imagery, and pop culture. He then combines the results to produce hyperrealistic or futuristic-looking paintings and sculptures, which are shown alongside documentary material. The works depict figures caught between human presence and technological or cinematic imagery. One portrays Zoe Saldaña during the making of Avatar: Fire and Ash, her face marked by facial-tracking dots and machinery; another is a stark reproduction of Prince Andrew’s paparazzi shot after he was released from custody. By placing contemporary celebrity imagery alongside documentary sources and technological processes, the artist blurs the boundary between reality and representation, questioning how images shape our understanding of people, events, and truth.
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