8 Must-See Shows at Berlin Art Week 2025

After an unseasonably wet summer dampened the city’s spirits, Berlin Art Week arrives to usher in fresh energy with five packed days of art events. From September 10th to the 14th, more than 100 galleries, museums, fairs, and project spaces will open their doors to international and local art lovers alike. The program features long-running events like the POSITIONS art fair at Berlin’s disused Tempelhof Airport, as well as events at more experimental, scrappy venues like Pickle Bar (a freewheeling performance space run by artist duo Slavs and Tartars).

This year, Berlin Art Week remains an expansive snapshot of the scene’s mix of global gravitas and experimental spirit. Adventure seekers will want to venture out to the concert venue Funkhaus Berlin for “Polyphonic Views,” a group exhibition featuring immersive, sound-based installations by 36 artists, including Anna Uddenberg, Hannah Rose Stewart, and Julius von Bismarck. Expect your step count to rise as the temperatures drop, and prepare for anything the skies have to offer: Berlin’s weather is often as unpredictable as its art scene.

Below, we’ve selected eight standout exhibitions to anchor your Berlin Art Week itinerary.

“States of Being”

Société and Hauser & Wirth

Sep. 11–Nov. 1

Fresh off the opening of Pace’s first permanent space in Berlin during this year’s Gallery Weekend, Berlin Art Week 2025 sees another international mega-gallery drop into the German capital. Hauser & Wirth has partnered with Berlin gallery Société for the “collaborative” group show “States of Being.” Works by 30 artists from both galleries are on view, offering a dialogue that spans eras and disciplines. Visitors will discover pieces by everyone from contemporary legends Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman to multidisciplinary artists Marianna Simnett and Lu Yang.

Uniting these seemingly disparate positions highlights a focus on the role of art in shaping humanity. Much like the distorting influence of social media on how we perceive and present ourselves, the show explores fluctuations of self-expression and performance across time through various media. With an expansive selection of artists on view, this powerhouse collaboration is a major show of the city’s strength as an art epicenter.

“It Used To Be”

Capitain Petzel

Sep. 11–Oct. 18

Since becoming one of the youngest artists to receive a Guggenheim retrospective at 45, American abstract painter Ross Bleckner has developed a singular visual language. His aesthetic focuses on the blurring and repetition of forms as he grapples with human and ecological vulnerability. With his second solo show at Capitain Petzel, his paintings strike a balance between abstraction and reduction, creating a sense of otherworldliness. “It Used To Be” presents canvases wrapped in the gauze of memory, where the edges of objects blur as his scope shifts between large and small-scale canvases.

Bleckner’s use of abstraction extends into the natural world, drawing inspiration from flowers and the sun through a series of works that nearly dissolve into apparitions; their solidity is chipped away, allowing for a more fluid interpretation. Taking inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe’s famed flower paintings, Bleckner abstracts the shape of his floral objects in Vase and Flower (2025), where wide red brushstrokes collide across the canvas like bumper cars. Meanwhile, in a work from his “Sunset” series, the red pigment reappears in the form of a giant dot that occupies nearly the entire breadth of the canvas, slightly misshapen and out of focus, as if Bleckner stared too long at the blazing object in the sky.

“By the Skin of My Teeth”

Sprüth Magers

Sep. 12–Oct. 25

One of multiple Art Week exhibitions for Sprüth Magers is Henni Alftan’s “By the Skin of My Teeth.” Taking its title from the old expression that signifies a razor-thin success, the show explores the balance between precision and abstraction in Alftan’s work. A suite of new paintings are presented alongside a series of drawings on colored paper—marking the first time the Finnish artist has shown works in this format. In her tightly framed canvases, Alftan turns everyday scenes and objects into almost Lynchian motifs. A simple wristwatch, nestled between sleeve and glove, or a flashlight beam, cut off by the canvas’s edge, become charged with tension through subtle tweaks and obscured details.

Throughout this show, Alftan leans into painting as both subject and process, elevating the material into a key part of the final image. In Haircut (2024), a lock of hair hovers between a pair of open scissors, with each strand formed by raised grooves in the paint, while Hand in Pocket (2025) sees the texture of the fabric amplified through the brushstrokes. Meanwhile, her new drawings transform seemingly banal items like Post-it notes, paperclips, and teeth into archaeological artifacts. The neatly arranged, small-scale works blur the boundary between the ordinary and historical, turning the detritus of material culture into an ode to still life portraiture. By balancing intimate and conceptual concerns, Alftan shows how images can unite object, memory, and imagination.

carlier | gebauer

Sep. 11–Oct. 22

At carlier | gebauer, a smorgasbord of positions comes together for “Fluid Systems,” an ambitious group show featuring works by over 20 artists, including Laure Prouvost, Kerstin Brätsch, and Lithuanian duo Pakui Hardware. The exhibition focuses on states of being, with fluidity acting as both a subject matter and method. Themes of gender and identity, as well as ecological and cultural histories, are presented not as fixed concepts, but as dynamic processes that evolve over time. By intertwining the artists’ many narratives so that they take on new meaning, the show forgoes linear interpretation in favor of a more open-ended narrative.

In the case of Bracha L. Ettinger, who celebrated her first major German museum survey at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen this year, fluidity takes the form of a swirling mass of amorphous blobs vaguely shaped like faces and bodies in Halala-Kaddish-Pieta n.5 (2017/2024). A blood-red splotch of oil paint seems to ooze out from within the canvas, evoking the Israeli French artist’s ongoing exploration of death and suffering. “Fluid Systems” promises to offer Art Week visitors plenty of philosophical ideas to chew through, underscoring how boundaries between self and world are never fixed but always in flux.

“Mothers”

Galerie Max Hetzler

Sep. 11–Nov. 29

At Galerie Max Hetzler’s Goethestraße space, American artist Grace Weaver marks her fifth solo presentation at the gallery with an exploration of two art historical touchstones: the female nude and the mother-child relationship. These archetypal motifs are given new depth through Weaver’s use of sweeping, almost calligraphic lines. In a series of large, square-format canvases, the titular “mothers” are shown cradling children in intimate embrace. Elsewhere, solitary figures shield themselves from the viewer’s penetrating gaze. The focus here is less on narrative than on posture; the figures’ elongated necks and tapering limbs lean toward abstraction, and the subtleties of mood are portrayed through body language alone.

Inspiration for the series came directly from a 6th-century Greek terracotta figurine of a mother holding a child that captured Weaver’s imagination. Here, this ancient image takes on a new form through a technical process that mirrors the fluid lines of her work. After sketching a series of drafts in ballpoint pen, Weaver paints onto her canvases on the floor of her studio—applying watery matte paint layer by layer in broad strokes. This method allows for her own movement to become imprinted in the canvas, as influences from the past are rendered in a series of poetic and intimate scenes.

“Unseen”

Galerie Crone

Sep. 12–Nov. 18

Few figures captured Berlin’s cultural chaos like Daniel Josefsohn, an artist once hailed by Die Zeit as “the greatest and most brilliant punk in the world of photography.” For Art Week, Galerie Crone presents “Unseen,” the most expansive presentation of the artist’s works since his passing in 2016. Developed by photographer and curator Ingo Taubhorn, the exhibition takes up the challenge of honoring the larger-than-life photographer by drawing on a cache of never-before-seen works provided by his estate.

Josefsohn became a key figure in Berlin’s post-Wall cultural era, rising to fame in the 1990s and 2000s. While his breakthrough came via the iconic MTV campaign “Miststück” (“Bitch”) and posters for the Volksbühne, a renowned Berlin theater, his biting visual style also reached wide audiences through his work for German magazines Tempo and Zeit Magazin. His archive is packed with funny, abrasive, and unfiltered images that mirror the man behind the camera. Josefsohn wasn’t just documenting the city’s hedonistic cultural stew—he was living it. For Berlin Art Week, his rebellious photos reveal how he transformed chaos into an enduring visual language.

“Position of Being”

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

Sep. 12–Oct. 11

The chair is the star of Lotte Keijzer’s first Berlin solo show, “Positions of Being.” Visitors to Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery will find familiar objects elevated into altars to memory. Bar stools, an Eames chair, a plane seat, and at least one toilet take on starring roles in her paintings, all rendered in a vivid, retro-futuristic palette. For example, I was here before you (2025) immortalizes her grandma’s purple armchair and the ginger cat perched atop it like a guardsman. Meanwhile, Boundless Behaviour (2025) captures the cracked, worn surface of a bar stool through a disorienting fisheye lens that may make viewers feel as intoxicated as the artist herself was in that era of her life. It was these seemingly innocuous stools that watched as she drank, danced, and, eventually, met the man who would become her husband.

Through these humorous works, emerging Dutch artist Keijzer explores what it means to literally “take up space” as she celebrates overlooked objects as sources of deep personal history. Her paintings’ textured finishes capture the way memories live beneath the surface, insisting that every position we occupy—bodily, emotional, or domestic—shapes our identity.

galerie burster

Sep. 11–Nov. 1