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.
THROUGH JUN 06
Sick Days
Exploring the bodily and social entanglements of chronic, and even life-long illness, the exhibition Sick Days, curated by Philipp Lange and Sophia Yvette Scherer, focuses on a very relevant post-pandemic subject. The group show features works in a wide range of mediums – installation, short films, photographs and sculptures – that engage with the sick body, the four walls that house it and the societal expectations of recovery and acceptance.
- Through Jun 6, Studio Hanniball, details
- Finissage with lecture performance by Lindsey Walsh Jun 6, 18:30
THROUGH JUN 07
Sophie Aigner & Clara Bahlsen: Fenster, Türen, Wände (Windows, Doors, Walls)
Set in Kunstbrücke, a former public bathroom below the Wildenbruch bridge, the exhibition with artists Sophie Aigner and Clara Bahlsen explores themes of visibility and concealment. Bahlsen’s installation is made up of traditional porcelain dog figurines that appear to be floating in a body of water. As viewers, we see both their heads above and their bodies below the water, while the painted-on faces of the dogs return our gaze. Aigner’s ceramic works portray exterior and interior body parts such as fingers or intestines, thereby exploring what is visible or hidden, public or private.
- Through Jun 7, Kunstbrücke am Wildenbruch, details
Avant-Garde: Max Liebermann and Impressionism in Germany
The exhibition at Museum Barberini showcases significant works by Germany’s avant-garde artists around Max Lieberman as well as younger proponents of Germany’s Impressionism inspired by French Modernism. Alongside the museum’s permanent exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, this show allows for an in-depth exploration of the similarities, differences and cross-overs between the turn of the century art movements of these two neighbouring countries.
- Through Jun 07, Museum Barberini, details
Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power
Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power, takes you on a breathless ride through 800 years of entanglement between landscape, myth and nation-building. And it’s full of art – just not by many names you’d recognise. The exhibition considers how Germany’s natural world has shaped its people – fed them, nurtured them, betrayed them – and how, in turn, they’ve shaped and oftentimes failed to protect it.
- Through Jun 07, Deutsches Historisches Museum, details
THROUGH JUN 12
Anna Ehrenstein: The Language of the Soil
In the exhibition The Language of the Soil, Anna Ehrenstein examines the underlying and mostly invisible exploitative labour that keeps digital platforms running. Working in close collaboration with researchers and worker-researchers, Ehrenstein has developed this new body of work including wall works, sculpture and video that takes ant colonies as a metaphor for the social power structures inherent to contemporary data economies.
- Through Jun 12, Fotografiska, details
JUN 12-JUN 14
Free Entry – Hamburger Bahnhof
The Hamburger Bahnhof is throwing open its doors for three days and nights of free openings, performances, DJ sets and events, transforming the museum into a social space. Details are still to come, but the exhibitions that are currently on already make it a strong weekend bet: Saâdane Afif’s Five Preludes, Shilpa Gupta’s What Still Holds and Lina Lapelytė’s CHANEL Commission We Make Years Out of Hours, which fills the historic hall with a vast terrain of wooden, almost Minecraft-like cubes meant to be collectively built by viewers.
- Jun 12-14, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
THROUGH JUN 14
Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations
The group exhibition and research project Tirailleurs presented at HKW focuses on the history of the eponymous group of soldiers, hailing from countries that were French colonies at the time, and who played a fundamental role in the liberation of France and Europe from Nazi Germany. The consideration of this often overlooked history is taken as a starting point to explore similar instances of exploitation across a range of geographies and temporalities.
- Through Jun 14, HKW, details
THROUGH JUN 26
Peter Hujar / Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision
© The Peter Hujar Archive / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Featuring the works of Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes, this exhibition at Gropius Bau puts intergenerational artists in dialogue with one another. The photographer Peter Hujar never became widely known in his lifetime, cut short by complications from HIV, though he never seemed especially troubled by this lack of recognition. He primarily captured important moments in 1908s New York with poignant black-and-white photographs. Deschenes and Hujar never knew one another, but despite being separated by generations and approaches, they share an understanding of photography as a tactile process. Deschenes’ sculptural and non-representational photographic works call attention to the process of photography and the mechanics of the medium itself. Taken together, the works of Hujar and Deschenes interrogate and stretch the conception of what photography can and should be.
- Through Jun 26, Gropius Bau, details
JUN 26
Brandenboogie #1
Not quite ready to go the whole hog, but still tempted by a little skin ink? As part of Marc Brandenburg’s ongoing show at the Berlinische Galerie, 20th Century Debris, visitors can get temporary tattoos, becoming walking carriers of the artist’s drawings. Warhol would surely approve. Brandenburg’s graphic world draws on pop culture, electronic music, punk and subcultural Berlin, so naturally he’ll be behind the decks. Temporary tattoos and an art-world DJ set – what more could you want on a Friday night?
- Jun 26, 17:00, Berlinische Galerie, details
THROUGH JUN 28
QUEER ART IN THE GDR?
Queer Art in the GDR? Biographies Between Underground and Propaganda is a collaborative project conceived by Kunstverein Ost (Art Association East) and partnered by nGbK, Mitte-Museum as well as the Museum der Dinge (Museum of Things). Though the term “queer” is a contemporary term that was not used in the same way in the GDR, it signals that this project explores the much overlooked lives of LGBTQIA+ artists living under a communist dictatorship. The project aims to gain and showcase a deeper understanding of what it meant to live outside of conventional norms of gender and sexuality and to produce art in East Germany.
- Through Jun 28, various venues, details
Constantin Hartenstein: Prototyp
Constantin Hartenstein’s solo exhibition Prototyp takes place in Galerie Parterre’s temporary location in the Kleine Wasserspeicher, a round bunker-like building that used to be part of Berlin’s water supply system. The sculptures and installations as well as video work throughout the exhibition stick to a limited colour scheme of mostly blue and metallic grey. Sculptures that look like everyday objects are meticulously arranged and staged almost as though they were props, hinting at themes of masculinity and queerness. The show’s title Prototyp (prototype) suggests that these bottles, backpacks, locker room bench and office materials are objects onto which the viewer may project their own story.
- Through Jun 28, Galerie Parterre, details
THROUGH JULY 5
Nicole L’Huillier: Rehearsal Room
Diving deep into the subject of sleep states, and particularly dreams, the artist Nicole L’Huillier presents the exhibition Rhearsal Room in the project room of the Schering Stiftung. L’Huillier’s artistic research focuses on the ability of sound to reach different levels of consciousness, for example, in lucid dreams. Set up in three stations, the exhibition offers a space for rest that entails calming sounds such as rhythmic heartbeats, a whispering choir that, upon closer listening, unfolds as dream narratives and finally a scientific discussion amongst experts about their research into sleep and dreams.
- Through July 5, Projektraum der Schering Stiftung, details
- Jun 26, 18:00, Lecture by Adam Haar Horowitz and discussion with Adam Haar Horowitz and Nicole L’Huillier (moderated by Christina Landbrecht)
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 5, Between Bridges, details
JUN 04-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 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
JUN 13-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.
- Jun 13-Aug 16, Haus am Lützowplatz, details
THROUGH AUG 23
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
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
JUN 06-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
JUN 11-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 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
JUN 5-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 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
ONGOING
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
