10 Must-See Shows at Berlin Art Week 2023
John M Armleder, installation view of Voltes II, 2003, at Hallen, 2023. Photo © Devid Gualandris. Courtesy of the artist and Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin.
There’s always something new at Berlin Art Week, the flagship annual moment for galleries and museums in the German capital. In Berlin, novel usually means multidisciplinary, experimental, and collaborative—and this year’s offerings are a case in point. Among these are the opening of Fotografiska Berlin, with solo shows from multimedia artists Juliana Huxtable and Candice Breitz, and a vast exhibition featuring Mire Lee and Valie Export at former power station Kraftwerk, part of the boundary-pushing music festival Atonal.
The week also marks the 10th edition of the city’s biggest art fair, Positions, taking place at the giant former airport hangars at Tempelhof. There, expect German galleries like Hamburg’s Galerie Melbye-Konan and Berlin-Neukölln locals Weserhalle to showcase the highlights of their gallery programs. Further north, a mix of Berlin’s institutions and galleries have teamed up to produce Hallen, a two-weekend event series at Wilhem Hallen, the second weekend of which coincides with Berlin Art Week. Alongside talks, performances, and curated collective happenings, galleries are presenting large-scale works, like an LED sculpture by John Armleder and a 13-meter-long inflatable installation by Anne Duk Hee Jordan.
This year’s Berlin Art Week also introduces a new “festival” format for galleries, courtesy of the team behind the city’s Gallery Weekend: Studio Mondial. In a former hotel on Kufürstendamm, 47 galleries, including local heavyweights Peres Projects and Galerie EIGEN + ART, will set up performances, readings, and exhibitions over the weekend of September 16th through 17th, often augmenting the presentations at their own gallery spaces.
At the same time, of course, many galleries are showing the highlights of their program this September. Here are the standout gallery shows at Berlin Art Week.
Lap-See Lam, installation rendering of “Tales of the Altersea (Prologue)” at Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm/Mexico City.
Lap-See Lam, who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2021, has spent the last few years 3D-scanning Chinese restaurants in Western locations. For her, the juddering glitches in the resulting images symbolize the loss of knowledge that happens across generations—a reference to the artist’s own family, who recently had to sell the restaurant started by her grandmother in the 1970s.
For Berlin Art Week, Galerie Nordenhake, which has represented Lam since she started her MFA at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art, will show versions of the artist’s narrative installation works that have been exhibited at The Swiss Institute in New York and Portikus in Frankfurt. “Tales of the Altersea (Prologue)” includes a VR work, Phantom Bouquet (2019–20), that digs into the transfer of intergenerational knowledge. Elsewhere, several haunting kinetic sculptures use neon, brass, and shadow play to reference the show’s conceptual touchstone: “Sea Palace,” a three-story restaurant-ship that sailed from China to Europe in the 1990s.
The show precedes Lam’s representation of the Nordic nations at the Venice Biennale in 2024, where she will be presenting a multidisciplinary work in collaboration with two other artists.
Bettina Pousttschi, Vertical Highways - Progression 01, 2023. Photo by Roman März. Courtesy of the artist and Buchmann Galerie.
The materials in German artist Bettina Pousttchi’s series “Vertical Highways” look oddly familiar. These metal sections are crash barriers, found on highways around the world, which the artist sources new and folds, wrinkles, and bends back to produce unsettlingly wonky standing contraptions. In red, silver, and pewter, they resemble people huddled together, or perhaps crumpled paper strips. There’s something urgent about these vertical, broken, and busted-up crash barriers, which conjure visions of wreckage and its aftermath. In the contrast between their shininess and misshapenness, an undeniable tension emerges.
Pousttchi, whose sculptures and photographs often reference the structures and regulations of public space, is best known for her series photographing clocks at 1:55 p.m. in each of the world’s 24 time zones. While one work from the “Vertical Highways” series has already been on view at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof since April, this show at Buchmann presents these works in a smaller, more intimate space.
Ragen Moss, Lookout & Lumen (lookout), 2023. Courtesy of Capitain Petzel.
Ragen Moss, who was a breakout name at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, creates hanging, pod-like sculptures out of mostly transparent acrylic, polyethylene, aluminum, and steel, often in series. Delicate, yet somehow sturdy, these suspended forms are painted with patterns and forms, and occasionally with short phrases that invoke immediate reactions. One work at the Whitney Biennial, Romanettes (with double Hearts) (2018), featured the scrawled words “tonight” and “tomorrow” on either side, sandwiching circadian time inside a splotchy, biomorphic form.
For her show across all three floors of Capitain Petzel, Moss is presenting brand-new works. Each involves a hanging “lumen,” or a flame within a transparent and metal casing, which will be lit during the evening.
Friendship: It’s the often-overlooked glue that holds the art world together. Artists Ming Wong and Asta Gröting have been friends for more than a decade, in which time they’ve been exhibiting separately at carlier | gebauer (Wong’s first show there was in 2012; Gröting’s in 2011). Now, looking back over this period, the duo have produced a joint show that explores the ways that the artmaking in the city, and the artists themselves, have changed.
While Berlin has a reputation as an artistic haven, it’s becoming harder for artists in the city to find the space they need to make their work. Wong, a performance and video artist originally from Singapore, and Gröting, whose sculptures and performances are focused on the idea of absence, build on this context in two films. Taking a quirky, investigative approach to the oft-examined subject of the artist’s studio, one film features a 3D-printed version of Gröting’s workspace. The gallery, too, will be transformed by vivid scenography that responds to the material conditions of Berlin’s fluctuating environment for artistic production.
Anicka Yi, LñRþRL, 2023. Photo © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul
Anicka Yi, £†K§ñ, 2023. Photo © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul
In her 2021 commission at Tate Modern, “In Love With the World,” Anicka Yi programmed a series of cephalopodic robots to interact with visitors using machine learning—part of the conceptual artist’s years-long experiments with machines and other species and the ways they interact with humans. Now, a new series of horizontal paintings build on these experiments, coming closer to figuration than previous painting works. Here, the material of Yi’s process is more explicit, with cells, algae, and other biological matter becoming visible in her works.
Meanwhile, a new series of pod sculptures, made of silicon, optical fibers and other materials, will also be on show, nodding to the critically acclaimed kelp versions she showed at the Venice Biennale in 2019. And it wouldn’t be an Anicka Yi exhibition without a scent component: This time, the artist has commissioned French perfumer Barnabé Fillion to create a custom scent inspired by the themes of the show.
Beatriz Milhazes, Memórias Infantis II (Childhood memories II), 2023. © Beatriz Milhazes. Photo by def image. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London.
Beatriz Milhazes is one of Brazil’s most established artists, and a strong proponent of contemporary chromatic abstraction. In this, her fifth solo presentation in Berlin, Milhazes is debuting a new body of works. All were crafted with what she calls her “chromatic free geometry,” using her characteristic “monotransfer” process, in which motifs and patterns are painted individually onto transparent plastic before being transferred to the canvas.
Deeply grounded in the vibrant, spirited traditions of Rio de Janeiro, where she both lives and works, Milhazes takes a more figurative turn in her new work. Paintings like O desfile de leques I (Fan parade I) (2023) and O Arlequim (The Harlequin) (2021–22) are filled with the vivid hues and dynamic rhythms of the famous Rio Carnival. Meanwhile, works like Inteligência das Estrelas (Intelligence of the Stars) (2022) reflect the deep natural connection Milhazes maintains with her surroundings, a recurring theme that is felt in the organic pulse of her work.
Eckart Hahn, Offer, 2023. Photo by Eckart Hahn, Reutlingen. Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin Wien.
Eckart Hahn, Coer, 2023. Photo by Eckart Hahn, Reutlingen. Courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin Wien.
Photorealistic painting seems to be having a bit of a moment, and Eckart Hahn’s surreal, metamorphic canvases certainly fall into that category. Depicting weird encounters between different species—brightly colored pigs, apes, or birds meeting one another in dark, imagined spaces—Hahn’s works recall the empty absurdity of 3D virtual worlds. Offer (2023), for instance, portrays an outstretched human hand pushing out from under the cloaked feathers of an eagle, proffering a tiny blue seed to a mouse. The eagle’s face remains hidden, leaving the viewer guessing at its intentions. “Hart wie Schein” (which roughly translates to “Tough as it looks”) shows a number of paintings playing with this ambiguity in absurd, humorous scenarios.
While the German painter has been working exclusively in painting since 1998, having studied photography and graphic design in Stuttgart and Tübingen, this will be his first solo show at Galerie Crone in Berlin. The artist has had previous solo exhibitions in German institutions like the Kunstpalais Erlangen and Mannheim Kunstverein.
Bernd & Hilla Becher, Grain Elevators, 1977–91. © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
The duo of Bernd and Hilla Becher became a defining voice in 20th-century photography by blurring the lines between the documentary and the artistic. In systematic monochrome photographs, they took a rigorous, consistent approach to documenting the architecture of industry by isolating buildings of the same type, like water towers, and presenting them in regular, grid-style series.
Influenced by 1920s German ideas of objectivity in art, the married couple focused on letting these structures speak for themselves. Their exhibitions harnessed a rhythmic, formal structure that is more common in sculpture (a medium for which they received an award at the Venice Biennale in 1990). At Sprüth Magers, two of the gallery’s rooms are dedicated to investigating the Bechers’ historic series, from grain elevators in the United States, France, and Germany to coal mine tipples in various industrial settings. Bernd and Hilla Becher, who died in 2007 and 2015, respectively, were recently the subjects of a traveling Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, and this show promises to further cement their reputation as pioneers in serial imagemaking.
Peter Friedl, The Dramatist (Anne, Blind Boy, Koba), 2016. Photo by Maria Bruni. Courtesy of the artist and KOW, Berlin.
Austrian artist Peter Friedl is interested in the spectacle of history: how narratives get constructed over time, and by whom. Following his monographic exhibition at Berlin’s KW Institute last year, Friedl is making his solo debut with KOW, presenting selected past works that mostly focus on historical figures who slipped under the radar. Among them are Anne Bonny, a female pirate; Rafael Padilla, an Afro-Cuban clown who rose to prominence under the name Chocolat in the first years of the 20th century; and Armenian art collector and oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian.
Friedl portrays this cast of characters, which spans the wealthy and powerful as well as marginalized outsiders, in sculptural installations.The work from which the exhibition takes its name, for instance,turns the artist’s selected protagonists into glove puppets. Friedl’s newest work, Everyone is a conspiracy theorist (2023)—which he created specifically for this exhibition—is a model reconstruction of the shack featured in the Charlie Chaplin movie The Gold Rush (1925). Placed perilously on a wedge-shaped platform, the construction questions the possibility of authentic reproductions in the realms of film, art, and, perhaps, life.
José Yaque’s first solo exhibition at Bode marks the culmination of a nearly decade-long journey exploring the chromatic and formal characteristics of minerals. The show features a series of abstract paintings of undulating patterns inspired by natural phenomena. In these paintings, as elsewhere in his practice, the artist applies pigments by hand, then wraps his canvases in plastic sheeting, using the plastic to make wave-like patterns like layers in a rock formation. The colors appear to disintegrate down the canvas, referencing the process of erosion and the raw and volatile essence of Earth’s subterranean energies.
These layered paintings show evidence of Yaque’s research into the origin of pigment, signaling his engagement with the visceral and transformative elements of his chosen medium. Earth, after all, is in a constant state of flux.
Correction: a previous version of this article stated that Anicka Yi’s sculptures at Esther Schipper are made of kelp. Instead, they are made of a range of materials including silicon and optical fibers.
