10 Must-See Shows during Berlin Art Week
Jan Zöller, Walking on footprints, 2024. Courtesy of Robert Grunenberg.
It’s that time of year again—Berlin Art Week 2024 is just around the corner, promising plenty to look forward to. This year’s hub of festivities, the BAW Garten, will be hosted at the Gropius Bau, offering a packed schedule of events from morning until night, including film screenings and moderated talks, dance performances, and cooking demonstrations.
Throughout the week of September 11th–15th, meanwhile, galleries will debut new shows, with a special late-night round of openings on Friday, giving viewers plenty of time to experience the works. While larger galleries and institutions appear to be favoring solo exhibitions this year, several highly anticipated group shows are set to take place at smaller galleries and project spaces. Notable among these are Wedding project space gr_und, Berlin University of the Arts’s Halbhaus, and a pop-up at The Terrace, the latter curated by DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM director Billy Jacob.
For those feeling overwhelmed by the abundance of offerings, worry not. We’ve curated a list of 10 must-see shows to help you get started.
Harry Nuriev, installation view of “The Foam Room” at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, 2024. © Harry Nuriev. Photo by Benoit Florençon. Courtesy of DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM.
It is safe to say that Harry Nuriev has carved out his niche in the creative industry. As an artist, designer, and founder and creative director of Crosby Studios, he has worked across a variety of disciplines, earning coveted collaborations with icons like Balenciaga, Nike, and Dover Street Market. Now, he’s turning his focus back to art with a highly anticipated debut show at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, “The Foam Room,” marking a new chapter in his dynamic career.
For this immersive installation, Nuriev will unveil a series of custom foam-producing structures that, with their embedded cables and lights, will transform the subterranean gallery into a sea of frothy white bubbles. This spectacle evokes the delicate, transient beauty of soap bubbles—held together by soap molecules—mirroring the swift coming and going of modern trends and our often fleeting focus on spatial and economic concerns. Amid a market-driven art world where artists can be seen as mere commercial props, the ephemeral foam underscores the fleeting and sometimes superficial-seeming essence of contemporary art.
Karl Haendel, As of Yet not Titled 6, 2024. Photo by Matthias Kolb. Courtesy of the artist and Wentrup Berlin.
This year’s Berlin Art Week is particularly special for Wentrup, as the gallery marks its 20-year anniversary. For the past two decades, founders Tina and Jan Wentrup have demonstrated unwavering dedication to their artists. The gallery has continued to support artists from its early days, when Jan began working with Gregor Hildebrandt—who recently presented his ninth solo exhibition at the gallery—to a long-standing collaboration with Turkish German artist Nevin Aladağ, who has risen to prominence with appearances at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 14. Building on these tight-knit relationships, the anniversary show presents works from each artist from the gallery in a dialogue with a commentary from a carefully chosen partner, such as artist Michael Sailstorfer or writer Tom Morton.
From the colorful, minimalistic abstract paintings of Jenny Brosinski to the exploration of the treacherous geographies of contemporary culture in the video works of Britta Thie, these wide-ranging contributions highlight the diverse creative voices that have shaped the gallery’s legacy. Together with their respective commentaries, these practices come together to reflect the gallery’s evolving vision, while celebrating its enduring commitment to fostering creative growth and collaboration.
Emma Adler’s work navigates the tangled web of digital and physical realities, exposing how digital propaganda can seep into and transform the world we live in. By homing in on the glitches and distortions within digital, disruptive propaganda, she uncovers the hidden “volatile truths” that challenge our understanding of reality.
The exhibition is based on an incident in Esslingen, a town near Stuttgart. During Ramadan, a local chapter of the AfD—a right-wing political party in Germany—circulated an AI-generated image depicting a barbecue scene. In the scene, guests’ faces were grotesquely distorted—an unintended yet jarring metaphor for the resurgence of fascism. Adler seizes on these visuals and transforms them into a haunting experience through installation and sculpture works. Through symbolic objects like fences, the show evokes ideas of both home and exclusion, while unsettling soundscapes blend the familiar with the eerie. This has particular resonance in German: Adler juxtaposes the notion of Heimat—a term for “home” that has been appropriated by extremist ideologies—with the uncanny (the semantically related unheimlich). In her work, Adler reveals how these original concepts become entangled in the rhetoric of right-wing extremism.
Based in London, Italian photographer Mino finds himself immersed in a city dominated by concrete—a material often seen as raw and unforgiving. Yet, in his hands, this gritty substance transforms into something unexpectedly poetic and evocative. By centering his exhibition “Socrates was killed!” around this material, Mino reenvisions it as something dreamy and nostalgic. His photographs possess a cinematic quality, evoking the hazy, vibrant colors of childhood vacations and often recalling the aesthetic of ’90s movie stills.
This aesthetic also comes across in the presentation style: Small photographs, nestled within oversized frames, invite viewers to experience the images as if they were cherished prints from a disposable film camera.
Luella Bartley is best known as an icon of British fashion, having worked at several major fashion brands as well as her own, Luella (for which she received an MBE). Now, having turned to art following the death of her son, she has begun a series of paintings exploring human movement and physicality.
In part, the works on show in “Passenger” are inspired by sitting in on dance rehearsals led by the renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor. The rehearsal space struck her as a realm where bodies shed individual identity, becoming vessels of pure movement and energy. She meticulously photographed and sketched the dancers, later returning to her studio to bring these moments to life. With colored crayon pencils, she etched sharp, decisive lines into the canvas, contrasting them with layers of translucent, watery paint. For the first time, Bartley’s figures are clothed, marking a shift from earlier works that centered more on the vulnerability of the nude female body. The clothing highlights the natural interaction between fabric and the flesh of the dancers, channeling a genderless energy, and emphasizing the fluidity and collective strength of the human form.
Iñaki Bonillas, Horizons of the Possible. © Iñaki Bonillas. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City.
Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas is not a photographer in the conventional sense, but a visual historian, engaging with the legacy of imagemaking in photography and cinema, using archival materials to probe the medium through a conceptual lens. “Horizons of the Possible” presents his recent work, uniting four distinct series that each reinterpret the horizon in film history—ranging from the contours of sleeping bodies to the lines and surfaces found in domestic spaces and open skylines.
Bonillas’s inspirations are diverse. For example, he rethinks Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14), reimagining the work as horizons to connect and infuse narrative unity into landscape stills. Elsewhere, a single still from an Éric Rohmer film, featuring a shirt hanging outside a window, becomes a visual that Bonillas interprets as a metaphor for photography itself. Regardless of the source, each series invites a slower gaze, uncovering subtle details in the films that might otherwise be overlooked.
Gajin Fujita’s debut solo exhibition at Buchmann Galerie marks a bold introduction to the Berlin art scene, introducing his distinctive fusion of American pop culture and traditional Japanese aesthetics. The artist is known for skillfully weaving the elegance of artsyukiyo-e woodcuts with the vibrant energy of modern street art—a reflection of his roots in the Los Angeles graffiti scene where he was part of the tagging crews KGB (Kidz Gone Bad) and KIIS (Kill to Succeed). He is also inspired by his Japanese heritage, as mediated through his American upbringing, and the broader phenomenon of cultural convergence in today’s globalized world.
Fujita’s animated style integrates the bold logos of multinational corporations with motifs reminiscent of the woodcuts and ukiyo-e paintings and the tribal signs of graffiti, the tension between tradition and present emphasized further by his use of gold leaf for the background. The result is a “contemporary cosmos,” as the gallery puts it, a space where cultural symbols collide, blend, and transform.
Jan Zöller, It’s still raining while some never dream, 2024. Courtesy of Robert Grunenberg.
Painter Jan Zöller is still young, but he has already exhibited extensively internationally, with numerous exhibitions in his hometown of Karlsruhe under his belt, as well as in Moscow and in Meyer Riegger’s booths at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. His paintings are marked by a distinctive, playful aesthetic, blending a fresh, modern sensibility with cosmic and surrealistic scenes reminiscent of Joan Miró.
In “Nothing else changes it just rearranges,” opening at the gallery’s new Kantstrasse space, Zöller uses materials like charcoal, stains, oil, and diluted acrylic to create works on canvas that are at once delicate and intense. His large-scale works reveal intricate layers of nervous, skeletal structures, suggestive of construction sites or X-ray images. For this show, Zöller won’t stop at the canvas—his paintings will also take over the windows and architecture of this former shop space.
“The Atlantic is Black” at ARTCO Gallery marks the Berlin debut of the São Toméan artist René Tavares, exploring the violent history of forced transatlantic Black migration and its lasting impact on the African diaspora. In particular, he focuses on the pivotal role of his homeland, off the West Coast of Africa, which served as a crucial logistical hubs and cultural crossroads during the Atlantic slave trade.
His large oil pigment, charcoal, and acrylic works in this show challenge Western viewpoints of Africa’s historical and cultural significance, and instead highlight the continent’s rich heritage. Take, for example, This Land Belongs to Us (2023), a portrait of a woman seated in the middle of a cotton field, cradling a chicken on her lap. The vibrant colors bring the scene to life, and though her expression is ambiguous, her posture is resolute and proud, as if asserting her rightful claim to the land beneath her.
Rebecca Horn, installation view of Concert of Sighs, 1997, at La Biennale di Venezia, 1997. Photo by Atillio Maranzano. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, 2024.
In 1989, Galerie Thomas Schulte inaugurated its space with a solo exhibition by German conceptual multimedia artist Rebecca Horn. Now, 35 years later, the gallery celebrates Horn’s enduring artistic career by presenting her expansive 1997 installation Concert of Sighs, alongside a selection of her more recent painterly and sculptural works. It’s an important moment to celebrate the wide-ranging contributions of Horn, who died at the age of 80 last week, and is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
The exhibition’s centerpiece installation was originally conceived for the Venice Biennale and will now be shown in Berlin for the first time. The large-scale sculpture, with its disheveled pile of concrete and wooden building materials, evokes a strong sense of destruction. Shattered stones, concrete fragments, and wooden slats are strewn across the ground, with curved copper pipes, resembling otherworldly fungal growths, emerging like strange, alien forms alongside an eerie soundtrack.
