Your Berlin Gallery Weekend Itinerary

It may be the buzziest few days in an often dark, but now very bright city. There’s a lot to look forward to in Berlin Gallery Weekend, with 52 galleries presenting over 80 exhibitions at locations throughout the city—not to mention all the parties, off-schedule installations, and near-unavoidable decadence that has come to define the German capital. So what are the most compelling shows to see?

I plan to start at Sprüth Magers, where Cyprien Gaillard‘s 3D video installation, Retinal Rivalry (2024), will be playing alongside a series of new wall sculptures (3 May–26 July 2025). It’s the film’s German debut, which will be accompanied by fabric-wrapped acoustic wall panels, worn down through the hands of past visitors and sketched with a dancing skeleton alluding to the inevitable touch of death and time.

The film itself is an ode to Gaillard’s adopted nation, touching on themes of suppression and internal conflict—along with the impacts of advanced digital image technology through a tour of unusual views of German monuments. From slow panning shots of a Nuremberg Burger King occupying a former Nazi substation to lingering scans of Berlin‘s Mauerpark graffiti and a look at a ‘Michael Jackson memorial’ in Munich, the near-30-minute production gives us collage-style moments of quiet absurdity, reminding us that the past is very much with us. Accompanying it is a stimulating soundscape by Berlin local Bill Kouligas, known for his experimental label PAN, which launched musical acts like Arca and Eartheater.

A few minutes walk from Sprüth Magers is Zuzanna Czebatul’s first solo exhibition at Dittrich and Schlechtriem, All the Charm of a Rotting Gum (2 May–21 June 2025), in which the Berlin-based artist takes on the Pergamon Altar to examine the aesthetics of power and question the visual monuments we hold onto. Czebatul’s approach feels relevant as Western populism surges.

Further down the road, Berlin-based Italian artist Monica Bonvicini is showing new work in It is Night Outside (1 May–7 June 2025) at Capitain Petzel. Over the gallery’s three levels, Bonvicini explores the environments women move through and how they negotiate agency with a mix of sculpture, video and drawing. Glass hooks holding feminine underwear, recurring chain links and mirrors, and a film showing rituals of alienation in split domestic and institutional settings allude to vulnerability, tools of oppression and desire, and the psychology of control and resistance.

Over at Trautwein Herleth in Kreuzberg, Texas-based artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) examines her experiences as a trans woman through pop art, formal abstraction, and contemporary queer codes. Found objects and digital language work hand-in-hand in Degenerate Art (Transexual) (3 May–7 June 2025)—look for nude mannequins wearing masks covered with Grindr symbols and outsized sculptures of breast implants.

Another must-see is Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s site-specific fog sculpture in the garden at Neue Nationalgalerie (2 May–14 September 2025). I’m looking forward to walking through the fog amongst the existing sculptures by Henri Laurens, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Alicja Kwade as mist shifts and obscures the work, trees and Mies van der Rohe architecture, perhaps offering a moment of slowness in a very busy few days.

In the West, you’ll find the event of the season with the opening of Pace and Galerie Judin’s new art home, Die Tankstelle. With galleries and an adjacent cafe and bookshop built from a converted 1950s petrol station, the shared space will present dual exhibitions this week (2 May–14 June 2025): a show placing the work of contemporary artist Robert Nava in dialogue with works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Dubuffet (Pace) and a Tom of Finland exhibition (Galerie Judin).

Nearby, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley‘s solo exhibition UNCENSORED (2 May–26 July 2025) will inaugurate the new space NOME ahead of her show at the Serpentine this autumn. Her work centres around fictional universes and game-based installations with themes connected to uplifting and expanding Black transness. The new exhibition places the viewer as the navigator of a world built from paintings, garments, video and folding screens. Horror and video game aesthetics are front and centre, alongside questions of agency, empathy and action.

A few minutes away on foot, a moving off-schedule visit could be Berlin-based Greek photographer Spyros Rennt’s presentation at the new Rosegarden, a concert and exhibition space next to Victoria Bar in Schöneberg. Rennt is showing a collection of work taken over the last eight years entitled To Kiss Against the Fire (3–30 May 2025). The photographs reveal tender moments of queer intimacy, both dreamlike and naturalistic, moving between daylight and after hours party scenes. The images feel very personal to Berlin, warmly examining the gentle ways the city’s queer community finds connection in the underground.

Finally, if there is time to travel from the centre of the city, I hope to make it to the Fluentum Collection, where Morag Keil, David Moser, SoiL Thornton, Phung-Tien Phan, Josaine M.H. Pozi, and Mona Varichon will be looking into the influence of screen-based technologies on our lives. Titled Rushes (30 April–26 July 2025) and in dialogue with pre-Internet 80s and 90s video art, the show places the aesthetics of the mundane alongside the monumental. Fascism is a theme once again, along with the impacts of everyday highs. —[O]

Main image: Exhibition view: Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Sculpture in the Sculpture Garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2 May–14 September 2025). Photo: © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz/David von Becker.