Discover Berlin’s vibrant art scene with our guide to the city’s must-see exhibitions. From the world-class Museum Island to private galleries on the cutting edge and unique underground art spaces, Berlin has it all. Make sure you read on for exhibition opening dates, gallery locations and more details for a diverse range of shows.
We order our listings with what’s closing soonest at the top. That way, you’ll never miss out.
JUL 8
SEXAUER Summer Party
Art talk, drinks and a group exhibition dedicated to some of Berlin’s most promising contemporary artists are waiting for you at SEXAUER’s summer party. Head to their gallery to catch their summer show at its best.
- Jul 8, SEXAUER Gallery, details
THROUGH JUL 11
Christiane Grimm: Spectra
Originally trained in architecture, Christiane Grimm’s installation work bring perception to the forefront, playing with colour, light, form and space. In Spectra, Grimm uses the materiality of vintage glass to distort and reflect and to emphasise the importance of sustainability in her practice.
- Jun 4-Jul 11, Galerie Sara Lily Perez, details
THROUGH JULY 26
Jochen Klein
Between Bridges, the non-profit exhibition space in Kreuzberg founded by Wolfgang Tilmanns, presents the first solo exhibition by the late artist Jochen Klein in Berlin. Though his career was cut short by a sudden bout of Aids-related pneumonia in 1997, the exhibition shows the breadth of Klein’s artistic output. Having studied painting in Munich, Klein took a particular interest in portraying the aesthetics of power with a keen eye for the ironies and paradoxes in spaces designed to exude a sense of structure and security. Klein never felt bound to painting as a medium and explored a more conceptual and collaborative practice during his time in New York. For example IKEA, his joint work with the Group Material collective, played on the idea of the Swedish retailer’s flat-pack life to extract its social implications.
- Through Jul 26, Between Bridges, details
THROUGH AUG 9
Brancusi
In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie presents the most extensive overview of works by the 20th century sculptor Brancusi. The Romanian artist, known as a pioneer of sculptural abstraction, radically simplified forms in search of an aesthetic ideal and had a particularly keen eye for the effect of light on varying surface textures. His studio in Paris, which has been partly reconstructed for the exhibition, became one of the hottest meeting spots for Paris’ avant-garde scene.
- Through Aug 09, Neue Nationalgalerie, details
Collective Osmosis
Contemporary artist Oscar Murillo explores interaction and exchange between his paintings, installation works and the work of Claude Monet. Using the concept as a metaphor, the exhibition presents new abstract works from the artist’s ‘Surge, Scarred Spirits and Disrupted Frequencies’ series, while also inviting visitors to take part in creating collaborative artwork throughout the summer months.
- Through Aug 09, DAS MINSK Potsdam, details
THROUGH AUG 16
Umut Azad Akkel: Holding My Drink in the Corner
Holding My Drink in the Corner is an interdisciplinary collaborative project between the artist Umut Azad Akkel and curator Ozan Ünlükoç. Exploring themes such as queer perspectives, migration, inclusion and exclusion, Akkel builds labyrinthine structures that encourage viewers to consider the ‘corner’ as a space in which to hide or to find refuge. The artist arranges stair-like structures made from metal, which are typically used in construction to allow foot passengers to cross temporary obstructions, in absurd never-ending pathways. Disorientation and obfuscation through architectural design invites contemplation on accessibility, hierarchy and underlying injustices within urban landscapes.
- Through Aug 16, Haus am Lützowplatz, details
THROUGH AUG 22
Cihan Çakmak: breaking is reflection
Cihan Çakmak works through questions of identity, patriarchy, intimacy, emancipation and gender. Addressing bias and psychological wounds, her photography traces the tensions between familial expectation and self-discovery. In her work, the body becomes a site of pressure, memory and control, and in her performative self-portraits especially, Çakmak turns that pressure outwards, asking viewers to confront their own perceptions, projections and responses.
- Through Aug 22, EIGEN + ART, details
THROUGH AUG 23
Berlin, the Bitch and the Witch
Considering magic as a force with which to challenge capitalist structures, the exhibition Berlin, the Bitch and the Witch shows works by 12 artist-magicians in the cavernous space of the Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch. Taking Silvia Federici’s feminist-Marxist publication Caliban and the Witch as a critical starting point, Berlin becomes a site of friction between invasive capitalist pressures and the healing-powers of artistic creation. Witches and magic are considered forces of resistance against existing powers and as drivers of alternative forms of healing and connection. Installation, video work, sculpture and sound shape the exhibition space, while the accompanying programme includes a series of performances.
- Through Aug 23, Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch, details
Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition
Bold, irreverent and always provocative, Marina Abramović has been shaking up the establishment with her performance art for several decades now. Featuring cinematic, sculptural and live installations, her show is without doubt one of this year’s highlights. Heavily tinged with Balkan folklore, her ritualistic performances explore how the body is at once erotic, political and deeply spiritual.
- Through Aug 23, Gropius Bau, details
AUG 28
The World Looks Back Shorts Screenings
The ruins of a medieval abbey are a strange enough sight in the middle of Berlin, and they should make an excellent backdrop to The World Looks Back, a free short-film programme curated by Canan Turan. The featured films explore protest and resistance from Black, feminist, Indigenous and diasporic perspectives, with works by Andrés Khamis and Caroline Monnet.
- Aug 28, 20:00, Klosterruine Berlin, details
THROUGH AUG 29
When Night Falls: Éric Baudelaire
Having transitioned from the field of social sciences to fine art, artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire’s research-led practice continues to be influenced by his former profession. The exhibition’s eponymous work is a multi-channel video shown on five screens and filmed across six locations in France. Baudelaire creates a sense of simultaneity that divides the viewer’s attention between the differing scenes of everyday life that reveal society’s underlying mechanisms without distinguishing between banality or lasting significance. On the ground floor of CCA Berlin, Baudelaire shows a series of wooden sculptures developed in collaboration with the students of the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris who also feature in his video work. Visitors are invited to touch these sculptures made from cherry wood to feel the smooth surfaces, the raised forms and carved out recesses.
- Through Aug 29, CCA Berlin, details
THROUGH SEP 02
The Lure of the Image
Images shape our online experience, luring us onto digital platforms via better-than-life scenes, mainstream or niche aesthetics and thrill-motivated visual storytelling. Photography and the production of images are utilised as primary modes of communication and engagement across digital platforms. The exhibition The Lure of the Image shows works by 14 contemporary artists who explore the mechanisms and implications of digital image circulation. Questions around themes such as representation, the body, sexuality, ideology and propaganda are addressed, while the exhibition looks to answer what it means to share a meme, a selfie, an emoji or other forms of digital imagery.
- Through Sep 2, C/O Berlin, details
THROUGH SEP 09
The Pazzi Conspiracy: Power, Violence and Art in Renaissance Florence
There’s something enjoyable about visiting a show within a show. While everyone else saunters through the permanent collections, you can purposefully march straight to it – that is, if you can find it. Even the Bode Museum guards weren’t quite sure where it was, hidden around the back of the coin section. In a story worthy of The Godfather, the supreme Renaissance patrons Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici were ambushed in a cathedral where Giuliano was killed and Lorenzo escaped. Through medals and artefacts, the exhibition traces the now-legendary episode and its significance for the Renaissance. Coins can often be fairly tedious, but the narrative is fast-paced and has magnificent highlights, such as Sandro Botticelli’s portrait of Giuliano, his downcast eyes heavy with foreknowledge.
- Through Sep 9, Bode Museum, details
THROUGH SEP 13
PRÉSENT – 10 Years of TROPEZ!
For 10 years, TROPEZ has presented contemporary art with a dose of pommes and mayo, chlorine and wet footprints. “We always warn the artists that by the end of the summer, there’s a chance the artwork might not exist,” says artistic director Nada Hussein. “People walk around, their wet hair dripping all over the sculptures.” That encounter is exactly what makes TROPEZ special. The exhibition PRÉSENT will include performances, concerts, talks, children’s workshops and a new reading series for kids alongside. As ever at TROPEZ, much will depend on weather, swimmers and the curious, often inexplicable behaviour of children.
- Jun 6-Sep 13, Sommerbad Humboldthain, details
THROUGH SEP 13
Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land
The Kyiv Biennial has again found a temporary home outside Ukraine, which says much about Europe’s current state of affairs and the uneasy realities of making culture in exile. Its Berlin chapter will take place at the KW. A building-wide exhibition and a live programme of sound, performance and discourse will turn the institution into a charged site of arrival, displacement and refusal. Highlights include a concert by Bulgarian Voices Berlin on Sunday June 14, followed the same day by Anna Ehrenstein and Yara Mekawei’s The Cloud Is Still Balkanized.
- Openings Jun 10 and Jun 14,
- Jun 11-Sept 13, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, details
THROUGH SEP 14
Marc Brandenburg: 20th Century Debris
Marc Brandenburg is a documentarian and commentator on contemporary urban life who aptly depicts the heights and pitfalls of late-stage capitalism. His solo exhibition 20th Century Debris displays more than 100 of his drawings in conversation with videos, tattoo editions and photos. In the centre of the exhibition, Brandenburg’s works are shown under black light, causing white areas in his works to glow and giving the drawings an almost 3D effect. Temporary tattoos, which are also part of the exhibition, have been a part of Brandenburg’s practice since 2012. He notably made a special edition for the 10 year anniversary of Berghain.
- Through Sep 14, Berlinische Galerie, details
THROUGH SEP 27
Cassirer and the Breakthrough of Impressionism
One-hundred years after his death, Paul Cassirer is being commemorated at the Alte Nationalgalerie. As one of the world’s most important art dealers, Cassirer brought names like Van Gogh, Monet, Manet and Renoir to the German public. The Cassirer and the Breakthrough of Impressionism exhibition travels through Impressionism and showcases Cassier’s commitment to the arts.
- Through Sept 27, Alte Nationalgalerie, details
THROUGH OCT 4
DISSOLUTIONS Sequence II: Mooni Perry
Mooni Perry’s solo-exhibition marks the second sequence in the Dissolutions series at Kunst Raum Mitte. The presentation centers around Perry’s video work ‘EL’ in which fictional characters play out a narrative inspired by the artist’s research into East Asian history – more specifically the complex colonial history of Japan’s rule in Korea and puppet state Manchukuo in northeastern China. Set in the dated hotel interior of the former Yamato Hotel in Shenyang, China, a young Korean poet and a Chinese opera singer reflect on their lived realities while dipping in and out of dream sequences. Ghostly appearances and an ominous atmosphere blend reality, fiction, history and speculative future. In the listening room adjacent to Perry’s video visitors can explore the stories of female performers of the Choson Opera Troupe that toured through Korea, Japan and Manchukuo via a sound and research installation.
- Through Oct 4, Kunst Raum Mitte, details
THROUGH NOV 15
Rooms / Stages and Helmut Newton’s One-off Album
The Helmut Newton is hosting a dual exhibition made up of two parts, both dedicated to transforming space into a stage. The front room exhibits a group show, Rooms / Stages, displaying the works of 12 artists. Helmut Newton’s One-Off album, located at the rear of the space, comprises 103 works by Newton and is being presented in its entirety in Berlin for the first time.
- Jun 5-Nov 15, Helmut Newton Foundation, details
- Opening Jun 4, 20:00
THROUGH NOV 15
Scandal! Hermione von Preuschen and the ‘Mors Imperator‘
This painting on display at the Alte Nationalgalerie scandalised Berlin society by depicting Kaiser Wilhelm I as a skeleton throwing down his regal throne. The artist, Hermione von Preuschen, ignored the Berlin Academy and took the bold step of exhibiting it herself. Berliners were allegedly so disapproving of it they queued around the block to see it, suggesting not much has changed in the art world in the last century and a half. It’s a mesmerising work: a skeletal foot curls grotesquely around a blue globe. The curators have placed it in the centre of an octagonal room, and it’s clearly been given a glow-up; restorers have made the lavish embroidery and furnishings gleam. But more striking is von Preuschen’s single-minded drive, pushing against the constraints placed on women at the time.
- Through Nov 15, Alte Nationalgalerie, details
THROUGH NOV 22
Ruin at the Venice Biennale
Though not technically in Berlin, Sung Tieu and the late Henrike Naumann bring the afterlives of East Germany to the German Pavilion in Venice. Titled Ruin and curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, director of the Georg Kolbe Museum, the project centres on the unresolved legacies of East Germany and those raised in the disordered aftermath of reunification. Outside, more than 3.2 million tiles cover the pavilion’s fascist, colonnaded façade, redesigned by the National Socialists in 1938. In one of the pavilion’s interior wings, Tieu installed an infestation of ladybird chocolates, turning what is usually a symbol of good luck into a nasty metaphor for the perception of migrant workers. For all the fleshy, abject thrills of Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian Pavilion and the furore around Russia’s inclusion, the dark ambivalences of Ruin leaves the most piercing mark.
- Through Nov 22, German Pavilion, Venice, details
THROUGH DEC 6
Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen
In Gabriele Stötzer’s works, the naked female body becomes a site of feminist empowerment – a force of resistance that overcomes societal limitations and challenges norms. She was sentenced to one year in prison in the GDR during the late 70s after being convicted of defamation of state. That did little to silence her political activism, rather it strengthened the rebellious tone of her artistic practice. Through diverse media such as painting, literature, photography, textile art, Super 8 film and performance, Stötzer explores themes of loss and isolation as well as female joy, desire and empowerment. The exhibition marks the artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date.
- Through Dec 6, Gropius Bau, details
THROUGH JAN 3
Shilpa Gupta’s What Still Holds
Shilpa Gupta, TRUTH, 2022–2025, © Courtesy Shilpa Gupta und Galleria Continua, Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio
Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta interrogates the conditions under which speech is permitted, constrained or silenced. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, video, public interventions and books, she addresses political persecution, border violence, religious nationalism and the lived consequences of military occupation. Language in Gupta’s work is never neutral or abstract; it appears as something embodied, fractured and precarious, shaped by power rather than freely available to all. In her new exhibition What Still Holds at the Hamburger Bahnhof, selected works are placed in dialogue with those of Joseph Beuys, whose ideas of voice, participation and social responsibility are reframed through Gupta’s uncompromising attention to censorship and the material risks of speaking in the present.
- Through Jan 3, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
THROUGH JAN 10
Lina Lapelytė: We Make Years Out of Hours
This year’s CHANEL commission was awarded to Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė, whose site-specific installation made up of wooden blocks, sound and performance takes over Hamburger Bahnhof’s central hall. Alongside the performers, visitors are encouraged to participate in building the ever-evolving architecture of blocks while engulfed by a sound piece that draws on texts by literary figures such as Etel Adnan and Ocean Vuong.
- Through Jan 10, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
Glas | Beton | Metall
This is a special year for Bauhaus. Last September marked the 100th anniversary of its move to Dessau in 1925, a moment the city and foundation are celebrating with an ongoing raft of new exhibitions. This exhibition recommendation isn’t technically in Berlin, but Dessau is a mere two-hour jaunt from Berlin on an ICE train, passing IKEA stores and long, flat-roofed warehouses that the movement helped popularise. The Bauhaus Building was completed in 1926, astonishingly within just one year, its stripped-back aesthetic is composed of what were then innovative building materials: glass, steel and concrete. These materials form the thematic backbone of its three new exhibitions: Glass, Concrete and Metal.
The shows are on the scholarly side, requiring a fair amount of foot shuffling and wall text reading. The glass section could use a few more objects. Concrete includes examples of wooden framing that remained integral to its building process. The metal exhibition is excellent, with an enormous narrative wall linking the movement to mining and industry in the region.
- Through Jan 10, Bauhaus Building Dessau, details
Destiny in the Stars – The Beginnings of the Zodiac
Alongside Nefertiti, the Neues Museum is showing a selection of ancient objects revealing the complex origins of star signs and horoscopes, first systematised by the Babylonians around 410 BC. It’s not the most thrilling of exhibitions (there’s tragically little for those wanting to find out if their love life is about to improve), but there are some stunning Egyptian amulets, beautifully carved in stone and bronze, carried for protection like mini-portable hieroglyphics.
- Through Jan 10, Neues Museum, details
THROUGH FEB 28
[ materialistin ]: Matter of Care, Care of Matter
[ materialistin ] is the name of a Leipzig-based group of women artists who work with sculpture in an expanded sense and who engage with materiality and corporality in an experimental way. The group exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof curated by Sam Bardouil shows works by the artists Laura Eckert, Enne Haehnle, Elisabeth Howey, Lucy König, Agnes Lammert, Wibke Rahn, Theresa Rothe, and Sophie Uchman, foregrounding social and cultural-political questions arising from the artists’ collective practice and solidarity.
- Through Feb 28, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
THROUGH APR 30
Fractured Lifeworlds
Fractured Lifeworlds confronts Germany’s colonial genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in Namibia. Although formally recognised in 2021, the genocide remains poorly understood in Germany. For the past four years, organisations Forensis and Forensic Architecture have been working closely with Namibian partner communities, documenting sites of colonial violence through local testimony, satellite imagery and historical records. With its mix of contemporary artworks, forensic research and testimony from affected communities and descendants, the exhibition is a difficult, often upsetting encounter that serves as a way to draw visitors directly into Germany’s unfinished colonial reckoning.
- Through Apr 30, Spore Initiative, details
ONGOING
A Thousand Times Berlin
© Courtesy of the artists / Photo: Jacopo La Forgia
On the occasion of the museum’s 30th anniversary, the Hamburger Bahnhof is showing a new collection presentation in its west wing. The title A Thousand Times Berlin indicates the exhibition’s focus on the multiplicity of artists shaping the city. This large-scale exhibition with more than 70 works by over 50 artists includes both new acquisitions and works from the collection that have rarely or never been shown before.
- Ongoing, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
Boros Collection #5
The newest presentation at the Boros Collection includes works by renowned contemporary artists such as Ed Atkins, Sung Tieu, Cyprien Gaillard, Klára Hosnedlová, Mire Lee and Klara Lidén. This extensive private collection is made open to the public through presentation in a World War 2 bunker and former night club. Visitors to the exhibition are required to book a guided tour in advance.
- Since May 3, Boros Collection, details
Museum in Motion
Hamburger Bahnhof re-opens its Rieckhallen with ‘Museum in Motion’, a dynamic showcase of contemporary art reflecting the evolving role of museums. Featuring large-scale installations by renowned artists like Cevdet Erek and Elmgreen & Dragset, the exhibition explores how museums must adapt to a rapidly changing world. Alongside ‘Nationalgalerie: A Collection for the 21st Century’, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on Hamburger Bahnhof’s extensive holdings.
- Since 2024, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
Joseph Beuys
One of the most influential figures in Modern art, Joseph Beuyes is being celebrated with a large-scale new exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Made up of around 15 works, including important installations like Tram Stop: A monument to the future (1976) and Das Kapital Raum, 1970-1977 (1980), the exhibition showcases the complex life and work of Beuys.
- Since 2024, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
