Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026 marks a crucial moment for the city’s cultural scene. Here are the must-sees

Berlin has always managed to outlast proclamations of its alleged endings. A city perpetually declared ‘over’ yet stubbornly, if unglamorously, alive. In recent months, however, the obituaries have grown louder and more insistent. The familiar critique – that a scene built on cheap rents and loose structures was never meant to last forever – has begun to feel less like provocation and more like diagnosis. If Berlin’s cultural capital was once buoyed by precarity, that same condition now threatens to calcify into stagnation.

Then came a week in late April 2026 that sharpened the mood into something harder to ignore. Several announcements landed in quick succession, disparate yet entwined in their 'vote of no confidence' in the city: collector Julia Stoschek confirmed the closure of her Berlin space come October; Artnet shut its Berlin office, effective immediately; Ryanair announced its withdrawal from Berlin starting October, cutting the city off from many direct flights; and the resignation of the city’s culture senator sent waves of political tremor through its arts infrastructure.

What’s more, all of this unfolds against a backdrop of prolonged fracture. For more than two years, the city’s art scene has been marked by deep polarisation, its communities strained by political and ideological divisions that have reshaped both discourse and collaboration. And yet, in a rare moment of collective stillness, those same communities recently found themselves united in grief, mourning the untimely loss of two leading artists, Thomas Zipp and Henrike Naumann, whose practices had helped define Berlin’s contemporary voice.

And still, the city’s tried-and-true Gallery Weekend format persists, benefitting this year from an unexpected realignment: now that the professional preview of the Venice Art Biennale moved to early May, Berlin has accidentally become a convenient waypoint, especially for those travelling from Asia. If Gallery Weekend Berlin has always functioned as a barometer – of energy, of relevance, of hype – then this year’s edition unfolds under a particularly charged moment. The question is no longer whether the city is changing, but what kind of city it is becoming, and for whom.

With nearly 60 galleries participating this year and countless other openings at institutions and special locations – for example, a group show curated by artist David Douard at Halle am Berghain – the city’s art landscape is straddling renewal and returns. The unofficial pre-Gallery Weekend highlight came courtesy of Galerie Neu, with new works by painter Sergej Jensen installed in every room of the simple studio apartment for guests of the KW institute. The city’s old guard gathered around Jensen’s new figurative paintings, small canvases featuring characters with clown noses (or dog snouts?). The mood was cheerful and nostalgic, as the promise of early-2000s Berlin flickered across visitors’ ageing faces. (The show is accessible by appointment only through 30 May and is well worth the trouble.)

Joining the official programme in the new section for young galleries called Perspectives, Mountains gallery enjoys well-deserved recognition after last year’s widely discussed presentation of David Medalla’s works. Now, the gallery returns with Korean artist Shinoh Nam. Titled ‘A Guide to the Interior for a House on Ambiguous Grounds’, the exhibition assembles a vocabulary of fractured architectures as a spatial argument. Nam constructs a fragmented ‘house’ stripped to its floor plan – an open, psychological interior. Steel, glass, and industrial foam are rendered both exacting and unstable, staging a tension between construction and collapse. Here, architecture’s promise of progress is recast as sites of contradiction.

A host of galleries offer shows by strong young voices who have captured the market’s attention recently, including Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler; Wynnie Mynerva at Sociéte; and Vivian Zhang at Max Hetzler, to name but a few. At Capitain Petzel, Rodney McMillian structures his first solo exhibition with the gallery around his new film, which is anchored in a historic anti-lynching speech by Ida B Wells-Barnett, delivered in 1909 at the inaugural conference of the NAACP. The text is not treated as archival quotation so much as a living address, spoken into the present tense. McMillian’s new works, meanwhile – sculptures and paintings from his Black Paintings series – carry palpable weight. What might read as abstraction insists on its politics, pushing against the idea of pure form and redirecting attention to the underlying structures that shape it.

Across town in Berlin’s old West, Galerie Buchholz delivers another debut – not just for the gallery but for Germany. Japanese artist Yuji Agematsu presents the first of a two-part exhibition with an installation of his delicate Zips – small, contemplative assemblages made from debris collected on daily walks through New York. Each fragment is placed inside the cellophane of a cigarette packet, turning the overlooked residue of a single day into a ritualised record. Installed on custom shelving designed by the artist, the works accumulate into a quiet calendar of movement and attention, shaped by a practice Agematsu has maintained every day since 1996. The second part, opening later in June, shifts the register entirely. It introduces a performance by the artist alongside a newly activated installation of 35mm slides, photographed in Marseille in 1994 and now projected into the present.

Sprüth Magers presents a triple bill: in the main space, Thomas Demand brings a suite of new works that extend his long-standing investigation into constructed images and their quiet authority. Built from paper, cardboard, and meticulous staging, the works reproduce environments that feel at once familiar and estranged. In this new body of work, Demand pushes further into the tension between evidence and illusion. The images reinforce their own sense of absence – no figures, no incident, only the residue of situations reconstructed from memory, media, or political imagery. For instance, one work returns to a widely circulated police photograph from 2024, where San Diego authorities intercepted a large shipment of methamphetamine concealed as watermelons.

While often described informally as ‘papier-mâché’, US Customs and Border Protection clarified that the drugs were actually 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 carefully. It’s an image of concealment that doubles back on its own methods of fabrication.

Meanwhile, Robert Elfgen fills the upper gallery space with lyrical assemblages, paintings on copper, cements, and wood, and sculptural interventions that build entire environments rather than discrete objects. Images of polluting power plants and industrial residues sit alongside mythic imagery; animals and imagined forms emerge against landscapes that feel at once constructed and remembered.

In the gallery’s lower level, Martine Syms’s contribution takes the form of ‘Dominica Publishing, a temporary boutique’ – a pop-up space that will exist only for the weekend. This attempt at displaying desire also found expression in her 2024 exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, a multimedia project that functioned simultaneously as artwork and concept store. Alongside its retail display logic, the Berlin shop includes works such as This Is A Studio / Aunty (35) (2023), which draws on surveillance footage of a late-night police visit outside the artist’s LA studio. Misunderstandings between officer and artist, spoken over the studio’s security system, circle uneasy questions about safety, belonging and power. Not to be missed.

Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026 runs 1 - 3 May

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