10 Must-See Shows at Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023
Sheila Hicks, Rempart, 2016. Photo by Raphael Fanelli. Courtesy of Meyer Riegger.
Kapwani Kiwanga, Shifting Sands (gold/blue), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
There’s no escaping it: Berlin’s art scene is entering a new era. After all, the German capital has finally opened its revamped Neue Nationalgalerie with influential curator Klaus Biesenbach at the helm; global photography museum Fotografiska is about to launch its new cultural center in the former art squat Tacheles; and there’s even (gasp) a new airport to welcome global visitors.
With the 19th Gallery Weekend Berlin taking place from April 28th through 30th, what can we expect from the 55 galleries taking part across the city? Well, a bit of everything.
Gallery crawlers can find daring, experimental work in time-based media like Loretta Fahrenholz’s solo film works at Fluentum, “Trash The Musical,” and Hito Steyerl’s computer-generated video installation at Esther Schipper. On the other hand, there’s also sculptural, abstract impasto paintings by Jason Martin at Buchmann, and existential paintings from Raphaela Simon at Galerie Max Hetzler. And, indeed, everything in between.
Here, we round up the 10 standout shows of this year’s Berlin Gallery Weekend.
Kapwani Kiwanga is having a major moment: Following last year’s show at the New Museum in New York, the Canadian artist has several major shows opening this year, from MOCA Toronto to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. She was also selected to represent Canada at next year’s Venice Biennale, having participated in the 59th edition’s main exhibition.
Expanding on the series from these exhibitions, Galerie Tanja Wagner’s space in Tiergarten will show the “Hour Glass” sculpture series, where four new works fill colored glass boxes with fracking sand in smooth optical shapes. Meanwhile, wall works such as Sisal #13 (2023), where pale sisal drapes down the wall, gesture to the complicated history of these fibers and how their production has been entwined in extractive, colonial economics.
Cao Fei, MatryoshkaVerse, 2022. © Cao Fei, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers.
Over the last two years, we have become well used to hearing about the impact of metaverse technologies. But Chinese new media artist Cao Fei has been at the forefront of the conversation on virtual worlds for the last decade, creating a number of works using footage from the video game Second Life, which she used to build a fictional Chinese city, using the avatar China Tracy.
For her show at Sprüth Magers, which takes over the whole of the gallery’s space, Cao presents a group of new videos that dissect the real-world impact of today’s latest developments in the metaverse. The show’s namesake refers to Cao’s first architectural creation in VR: a huge floating ring, surrounded by aquatic shapes. The show also promises to reveal some new directions in Cao’s practice, in which she dissects the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic both on her daughter and her peers (stuck inside, alienated from nature), as well as her mother (who lost her husband, Cao’s stepfather, to complications from the virus).
Sheila Hicks, Rempart, 2016. Photo by Raphael Fanelli. Courtesy of Meyer Riegger.
One of the most revered textile artists of her generation, Sheila Hicks’s pioneering work is vibrant and expansive, but always informed by her passion for making and craft. Having worked with Anni and Josef Albers (bringing together Josef’s interest in color with Anni’s interest in structure), she uses techniques such as knotting, weaving, and spinning to create sculptures and wall works out of fibers in vivid colors. In this retrospective show with Meyer Riegger, decades of textile experimentation from the American artist are on view, including more recent work in which brightly colored threads, as if bands of elastic, are wrapped over and over one another to create splintering, monumental sculptures.
Reba Maybury, no hobbies, mid 40s artist, Berlin, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Efremidis.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous painting The Medical Examination (1894) is the subject of Reba Maybury’s show at Efremidis. As a “political dominatrix,” the British Pakistani artist commanded her “subs” (who pay to be ordered around by her) to create paint-by-number versions of this work. This results in slightly different variations of Lautrec’s image that depicts female sex workers queueing up to be examined by doctors for syphilis, as required by law at the time. Maybury’s works are each titled with a biographical description of the painter, and when and where they made the work (e.g. no hobbies, mid-40s artist, Berlin, 2022). The series makes a provocative reference to the complicated power dynamics of sex work, and how the art world—entwined in exchanging cultural capital for real capital—seems to mirror that interplay.
Malcolm Morley, Lifeguard, 1988. © The Estate of Malcolm Morley. Photo by Jens Ziehe. Courtesy Wendy Gondolas.
Airplanes and ships from a childhood during World War II are among the most frequent elements of paintings by Malcolm Morley. In Capitain Petzel’s latest retrospective of the artist, who died in 2018, these military vehicles feature in paintings in a variety of the styles that Morley experimented with throughout his 60-year practice, from Photorealism to Neo-Expressionism. Curated by Michael Short with an accompanying publication surveying the artist’s work, this show focuses on the British American painter’s passion for creating a sensation within the viewer of having a bodily effect rather than creating a certain visual representation. “I feel the sensation of it, and pre-imagine it made of paint,” the artist once said.
Olaf Nicolai, “I never look at you from the place from which you see me”
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Mitte
Apr. 27–May 27
Olaf Nicolai, I never look at you from the place from which you see me, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie EIGEN + ART.
Galerie EIGEN + ART recently turned 40 years old. For Berlin’s Gallery Weekend, it will celebrate the occasion with a show of new works by renowned German conceptual artist Olaf Nicolai. In these photographs, created in Olympia, Greece, Nicolai turns his camera to the parabolic mirror—the tool traditionally used to light the Olympic flame—that functions by concentrating the sun’s rays onto a single point. Portraying the landscape of this infamous Greek location reflected in the mirror’s distorted view, these works question how a communal focus, both literal and metaphorical, can shift meaning. Meanwhile, in the gallery’s second space just around the corner, rising painters Elsa Rouy and Emil Urbanek present bold, whimsical new figurative works.
Paloma Proudfoot, detail of The Three Living and The Three Dead, 2022. Photo by Ivo Faber. Courtesy of the artist and Soy Capitán.
For her latest exhibition at Soy Capitán, Paloma Proudfoot has taken inspiration from the medieval British legend “The Three Living and The Three Dead,” which features three corpses chastising three living noblemen, a reminder of the ephemerality of life, in the tradition of memento mori. In consecutive friezes, Proudfoot’s wall-based ceramic portrayals of bodies take center stage in her signature style reminiscent of cut-out dolls. Although the medieval concept of death is the starting point for this series, Proudfoot incorporates a contemporary understanding of the body as an organism in a wider ecosystem: Her figures sprout flowers and peel back their skin to reveal the flesh and blood vessels underneath.
Britta Thie, Focus Puller, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Wentrup.
Over the last few years, young German artist Britta Thie made new friends through her job working as an actor. These sources of companionship, however, aren’t humans, but rather the behind-the-scenes technical equipment that is needed on a film set. In a new show of paintings at Wentrup, Thie portrays tripods, lighting rigs, and cable setups in minute photorealistic detail. Having also previously made video works as a director, often exploring the ways that the internet seeps into our material reality to impose a kind of delusion, Thie’s new works continue the artist’s interest in world-building through screens.
“Simurgh. Ten Women Artists from Iran,” featuring Yalda Afsah, Mehraneh Atashi, Ramesch Daha, Nooshin Farhid, Parastou Forouhar, Mona Kasra, Anahita Razmi, Neda Saeedi, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, and Soheila Sokhanvari
Galerie Crone, Charlottenburg
Apr. 17–June 17
Anahita Razmi, NO NATIONAL FLAG USES A GRADIENT, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Carbon12 Gallery.
As women in Iran continue to protest for the right to bodily autonomy, this wide-ranging group show at Galerie Crone selects several women artists from Iran, all of whom live outside the country. Named after the Simurgh (a magnificent mythical bird from a 12th-century Islamic epic poem), the show has been curated by Başak Şenova, professor of research at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, as a gesture of solidarity with those protesting. Some have distinct political statements to make (such as Anahita Razmi’s 2022 installation No National Flag Uses a Gradient #1 – 8), while others focus on individual expression (such as Parastou Forouhar, who makes detailed, kaleidoscopic prints). All, however, focus on subtle, multilayered expressions over flashy or striking messaging.
Aziz Hazara, Coming Home, 2021–present. Photo by Sher Abbas Aliyar. Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter.
Born near Kabul in Afghanistan, Aziz Hazara makes media works critiquing the minutiae of war’s pervasive impact. By addressing the interpersonal and environmental realities on the ground in his homeland, he demonstrates how these lived experiences are irrevocably marked by the global military-industrial complex. In “No Dress Code,” his solo Gallery Weekend show at PSM, Hazara brings this critical perspective to reflect on the legacy of war in Afghanistan, and the dissonance between its portrayal in the West and the lives of those on the ground.
