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 OCT 8
U8 Haus Summer Show
Summer might be coming to an end, but you can still catch the tail end of U8 Haus’ summer show, featuring works from local Belrin-based artists. Some of the highlights in this show are sculptural objects by U8 Haus artist Phillip Staffa and paintings by Jana Jacob (see above). The space is relatively new, but their openings tend to be packed. Keep your eyes open for their fall event!
- Through Oct 8, U8 Haus, details
THROUGH OCT 10
Gregor Hildebrandt: Park By POCO
Contemporary artist Gregor Hildebrandt is obsessed with music and with using its physical remains as material. Born in Bad Homburg, he has lived and worked in Berlin since 1998, collaborating closely with bands and musicians and turning the physical residue of their recordings into artworks. For his signature ‘negative’ paintings, magnetic tape is pressed onto canvas, peeled away and then reapplied. Song and film references run throughout his work, their traces physically imprinted into its surfaces.
- Through Oct 10, Wentrup Gallery, details
THROUGH OCT 11
After Memory
After Memory is a group exhibition which evolves from the ongoing research project of the same name that draws on the input from key figures in art, science, technology, museology, and activism. The project investigates how we remember and forget in a world of information overload and decreasing separation between online and offline life. Memory has become digital real estate and is segmented into online bubbles shaped by algorithms. The exhibited works at Kunstraum Kreuzberg by 15 international artists consider both the risks that social media, artificial intelligence, clouded and automated data storage pose as well as the potential therein.
- Through Oct 11, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, details
Symphony of Colors
The first comprehensive Paul Signac exhibition in Germany in decades, Symphony of Colors: Paul Signac and Neo-Impressionism explores the artist’s role within the Neo-Impressionist movement and his influence on the art world of the late 19th century. The exhibition features almost 100 works, a third of them Signac’s.
- Through Oct 11, Museum Barberini, details
THROUGH OCT 17
Krys Huba: falling into you
With a focus on early internet culture, and more specifically on what they call “pre-streamers”, artist Krys Huba investigates bodily autonomy in the digital age. When someone presents themself online, they have the potential to shape their own public perception, but there’s also a risk that their image being used for more nefarious and unauthorised uses. The disembodied and para-real realm of the internet has historically been a place of comparative freedom for bodily, gender and sexual expression. In the paintings shown in their solo exhibition, falling into you at the art association Soft Power, Huba transfers fragments of this historic digital imagery onto canvas, on top of which they paint soft-toned, ethereal images, bringing this era of digital history beyond the screen.
- Through Oct 17, Soft Power, details
THROUGH OCT 18
Black, Green, Pink: R.H. Quaytman, Frances Scholz and Nandi Loaf
The group exhibition Black, Green, Pink at Scherben brings together three artists from two generations. Since the 1980s and 1990s R.H. Quaytman and Frances Scholz have expanded painting’s potential beyond the canvas and considered it in close relation to broader artistic, intellectual and societal contexts. Nandi Loaf, who was born in the 1990s, began her artistic career in a world where digital imagery circulates at dizzying speeds and is easily extracted from its original context to be pasted, airdropped, photoshopped and reused. The exhibition asks what an image can do today and how our perception of it is influenced, not just by its material reality, but the conditions that shape its production and circulation as well.
- Through Oct 18, Scherben, details
THROUGH OCT 25
Fog Sculpture in the Sculpture Garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie
Back by popular demand, Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s installation in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s sculpture garden, dis- and reorients, reframing the sculptures installed in the garden. The sculpture starts on the hour and every half hour between 11:00 and 17:00, except on Thursdays it runs until 19:00.
- Through Oct 25, Neue Nationalgalerie, 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 14
Alicja and Bożena Wahl: Tensions
As twin artists, the works by Alicja and Bożena Wahl are filled with repetition and doubles. The exhibition Tension at CCA Berlin marks the first expansive posthumous exhibition focussed on the sister’s œuvre of drawings, paintings and stage designs. Alicja and Bożena both studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in post-war Poland and soon began exhibiting their works together. The detailed drawings show limbs that twist like branches, hair that morphs into bodies which in turn seem to melt into each other and all in a universe of the artists’ own making. Beyond works by both artists, the exhibition encompasses archival materials such as photos, letters and exhibition invites that allow insight into the social circles in which the Wahl sisters moved and the regional and international context of their artistic output.
- Through Nov 14, CCA Berlin, details
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 DEC 12
Arash Nashiri: A Bug’s Life
Not to be mistaken for the Disney movie of the same name, Arash Nashiri’s A Bug’s Life, is both the title of his video work and his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Nashiri, born in Tehran but living in Berlin, is interested in architecture as a site of memory that bears traces of both real and speculative narratives. His video work follows a puppet shaped like an insect as it curiously yet timidly explores an opulent Beverly Hills mansion. This building full of marble and gold is one of the last existing mansions that the architect Hamid Omrani built for the Iranian diaspora and which were derogatively called ‘Persian Palaces’. Beyond the video work the exhibition presents two new sculptural series by Nashiri which further explore architectural styles and the aesthetic and cultural ideologies they represent.
- Through Dec 12, Fluentum, details
THROUGH DEC 20
Projektionen auf den Osten
The interdisciplinary project Projektionen auf den Osten questions preconceived notions of West versus East, while also investigating differing political and ideological understandings of the East from various perspectives. The corresponding exhibitions at Schinkel Pavillon and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein allow these projections to take form in artworks across various media, such as video works by Hito Steyerl, sculpture by Anastasiya Yarovenko and tapestries by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán. The approaches are just as varied, spanning a whole range of feminist and decolonial perspectives. The exhibition reveals how subjective interpretation is, and its dependence on geographical, political, cultural and historical perspectives.
THROUGH DEC 31
Lucia Tallová: Moving Clouds
Moving Clouds is the solo exhibition by Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year Lucia Tallová and will be the last exhibition shown at Palais Populaire before it closes at the end of the year. Tallová takes a surprisingly sculptural approach to collage, using imagery drawn from books and magazines found at flea markets and antiquarian bookshops. Paper is crumpled or carefully folded, attached to columns, or spilling out of furniture, imbuing these historic clippings with new vitality and associations. Thematically, Tallová’s focus is on women’s history, drawing attention to forgotten and repressed narratives.
- Through end of 2026, Palais Populaire
THROUGH JAN 3
On Landscape
Landscape painting has been a popular genre throughout art history, with prominent examples including Caspar David Friedrich’s dramatic nature scenes and the plein-air paintings of Impressionists like Claude Monet. The exhibition On Landscape at Haus am Lützowplatz looks at landscape from a contemporary standpoint and asks how artists are reinventing the genre today in the face of environmental crisis, ongoing exploitation of natural resources and lives increasingly spent online. Fourteen international artists show landscape in a variety of media, such as painting, photography, and sculpture.
- Through Jan 3, Haus am Lützowplatz, details
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 JAN 17
Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960
As a district that bordered the Berlin Wall and that offered affordable housing for a range of communities, Kreuzberg became the home for a large number of Berlin’s migrant workers and artists. The exhibition Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960 shown at Gropius Bau, situated in the eponymous district and focuses on artists who arrived in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Through painting, print, photography, sculpture and film, the exhibited works explore themes of ostracisation and solidarity, discrimination and empowerment, stereotypes and cultural pride. The works in the exhibition show how the so-called Gastarbeiter were actively recruited by the West German government after the 1960s to fill in for vacancies on production lines. Upon arrival these workers and their children were faced with unfair working conditions and xenophobia. With political tensions rising specifically around topics of migration, the exhibition shows how integral the migrant community were and are in shaping Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.
- Through Jan 17, Gropius Bau, details
OCT 24-FEB 14
Tanja Ostojić: ENCOUNTERS — On Bodies, Borders, Resistance
In Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–2005), the Yugoslav-born artist advertised herself online as searching for a European spouse using a naked, shaven-headed photograph. She eventually met and married a German man in a performance that lasted five years, ultimately ending in a divorce party. It was a work of extraordinary commitment that anticipated how female bodily autonomy and online intimacy would become increasingly transactional and exposed. Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien is now staging the largest exhibition of Ostojić’s work in Germany. Across a practice dealing with migration, feminism and institutional power, she repeatedly puts herself inside the systems she critiques, using her own body and legal status to test their limits and expose the roles they force people to perform.
- Oct 24-Feb14, Kunsthaus Bethanien, details
THROUGH FEB 27
Kira Freije: Between Sunlight
Between Sunlight is Turner Prize-nominated artist Kira Freije’s solo exhibition at the KINDL. Freije creates sculptural constellations made up of human-like figures. The hands and feet of her sculptures are cast in aluminium from her own body, and the faces are those of people close to her. The figures are emotive, set in relation to each other in intimate embraces, leaning on or facing one another. The eyes are, however, closed, leaving the exact relation between the figures ambiguous. This enigmatic storytelling is a signature of Frieje’s artistic practice.
- Through Feb 27, 2027, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, 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 5
Jeewi Lee: Residual Memories
Berlin-based artist Jeewi Lee takes a particularly close look at what is hardly visible to the human eye. With the support of geometrist Phillip C. Reiner, Lee scans and enlarges grains of sand up to 3,000 times their original size. These giant grains are on view in her solo exhibition, Residual Memories, in the form of 3D-printed sculptures that show what is otherwise impossible for us to see. The sand Lee explores bears its own history on its uneven and crevassed surface. There are also colour-field paintings made from sand and a sound piece made in collaboration with sound artist Jared Meier-Klodt that uses recordings of sand in various everyday contexts. Lee draws our attention to the fact that sand, as a natural resource, is not neutral. It carries associations of extraction and exploitation, but also of geological memory and resilience.
- Through Apr 5, Berlinische Galerie, 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
THROUGH MAY 30
Mischa Kuball: boiler house
For this site-specific work, Mischa Kuball is using light to explore the Kesselhaus at the KINDL museum. Her use of light as a medium within the context of this historical building is meant connect the past to the present.
- Through May 30, KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, details
THROUGH JUN 20
Ryuichi Sakamoto: seeing sound, hearing time
The late Oscar-winning composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto was a pioneer of electronic music and ahead of his time, foregrounding sound in art. Sakamoto had a particularly wide range of influences, spanning film scores, co-founding the legendary techno group Yellow Magic Orchestra and working with a number of international artists. seeing sound, hearing time presents Sakamoto’s large-scale installations as sonic spaces that use technology, nature and visuals to allow visitors to experience music and sound rather than just listening to it. The exhibition is part of Hamburger Bahnhof’s 30th year anniversary programming and is a nod to the institution’s long-term commitment to strengthening the ties between art and music.
- Through Jun 20, 2027, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
THROUGH AUG 29
Guerilla Girls
Before entering the exhibition at neuer berliner kunstverein, look up at the façade, where the feminist artist group Guerrilla Girls have installed a site-specific intervention. Above the windows, looking out onto the busy Chausseestraße, the gorilla-masked artists have installed signage that challenges Berliners to count how many female nudes, compared to women artists, are on display in the city’s public museums.
- Through Aug 29, n.b.k., details
ONGOING
Next Door
Back in the early 2000s, the five heavy-hitting artists involved in the Hamburger Bahnhof’s exhibition, Next Door, had studios located in the warehouses quite literally next door to the museum. Although each participating artist has a vastly different practice, aesthetic and conceptual base, their proximity brought them together once before, and it will once again. Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Henrik Håkansson and Tomás Saraceno will all be presenting their works in this uniquely curated show as part of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Some works will be site-specific, like Dean’s video collaboration with Bruce Nauman planned for the Rieckhallen; some will be throwbacks like Saraceno’s revival of ‘14 Billions (Working Title)’, shown for the first time in 15 years and some will be exactly what you’d expect, like Eliasson’s reinterpretation of audio waves into ethereal, reactive light displays. It will be interesting to see what resonances pop up between the artists’ works once they’ve been reunited in both space and proximity to one another again
- Opens Oct 9, Hamburger Bahnhof, details
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
