Berlin has been the capital of the German art market since the end of the 1990s. At least when it comes to the primary market for contemporary art. This is astonishing in that there is neither a major art fair in Berlin nor a long-established bourgeois collector community, such as in the Rhineland, that could use “old money” to provide the necessary basic volume of purchasing power. Almost thirty years later, Berlin is still drawing on the promise of new beginnings and success of those art education enthusiasts who found in the reunified capital the freedom that artists need to live and work.
Instead of a central marketplace for the sometimes fleeting goods of visual art production, two more informal formats have been established: the Gallery Weekend Berlin and the Berlin Art Week. Art weeks based on this pattern are now part of the calendar of many metropolises around the world. The Berlin edition is celebrating its 15th anniversary for five days this year. And it now meets the expectations that one might have of an art festival in an art capital: it brings together the commercial operations of the galleries with the private collections and foundations as well as the public museums and exhibition halls.
There were years when galleries and museums in Berlin lived side by side, unaffected. Berlin Art Week was laughed at as a clumsy marketing vehicle for the city, instead of being understood as exactly that: an opportunity to turn the notoriously fragmented art landscape into a common venue for a few days. The insight now seems to have prevailed that an art festival does not thrive solely on individual “content”, but rather on the feeling that everyone involved is at least temporarily working on the same thing.
The idea has been demonstrated for several years in the Reinickendorf Wilhelmhallen, where a festival within a festival has been established with halls (until September 13, 2026). The former industrial buildings in the north of Berlin offered the kind of open space that has largely disappeared in the closed, gentrified city center. In its seventh edition, the format combines a curated large-scale exhibition with presentations from museums and collections as well as a sales show for galleries. More than 50 artists are represented on over 9,000 square meters. This has now also become interesting for participants outside the city limits.
The Schirn Kunsthalle from Frankfurt am Main is a guest for the first time. With the exhibition “Future of Yesterday” by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, she presents a revision of the radical, sober straight edge scene that formed in the early 1980s. Today she serves as an example to artists of how they can maintain their desire for independence. The Wolfsburg Art Museum is also there and is showing works by Julian Charrière, one of the most internationally visible artists living in Berlin.
15 galleries occupy the small hall fair. In addition to heavyweights such as Esther Schipper and Mehdi Chouakri, who are also permanently based in the Wilhelmhallen, younger Berlin galleries such as Robert Grunenberg, ChertLüdde and Office Impart are taking part. Fortunately, competition also comes from other parts of the republic: from Hamburg, for example, the Mathias Güntner gallery, from Stuttgart Exo and from Cologne Schenkweitzdörfer. You can remind Berlin not to become too complacent and stew in its own juices. Which brings us to Daniel Spoerri, the founder of Eat Art, who died in 2024. Galerie Levy is staging one of his legendary dinner happenings again.
Without an art fair at all? That would be too much of an idiosyncrasy, even in Berlin. The Positions Berlin Art Fair is now the only conventional fair to fill the void. Its 13th edition brings 96 galleries from 20 countries to two hangars at the former Tempelhof Airport (September 10-13, 2026); a focus is on galleries in Türkiye. The fair itself is not part of the global itinerary of art trophy hunters. Precisely for this reason, it presents quite frankly that market area that is not in the media focus, but still has a loyal customer base.
The Gallery Weekend, which reliably attracts international art buyers and probably also “new money” to Berlin on the last weekend in April, is also present at Art Week. Around 50 galleries will take part in Gallery Night (September 10, 2026), and they will boast prominent names. Bastian, for example, shows Robert Rauschenberg and Dittrich + Schlechtriem the dramaturge Ersan Mondtag (who also sends live performers to the Gemäldegalerie, premiere on September 11th).
Thomas Schulte exhibits Kerstin Brätsch and Katharina Sieverding. Sprüth Magers is reminiscent of Walter Dahn and Salvo. New to Galerie Neu is Jeremy Shaw, who deals with the exceptional phenomena of human experience in films and sculptures. Perhaps, according to the hope of many galleries, something will happen in the Berlin autumn before the trade fair season draws collectors in droves to London and Paris.
Important for Berlin are the private collections, which are among the galleries' good customers and quite a few of which strive for publicity themselves. The best known is probably the Boros Collection, which rearranges its inventory in an old high-rise bunker not far from the Friedrichstadtpalast about every two years. The Haubrok Foundation, located in the former GDR government headquarters, and the Fluentum, located in the former US Army headquarters in Dahlem, have also made a name for themselves with ambitious exhibitions of minimal art and video art.
The Hackelsberger Collection is younger and has rooms in Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. A group exhibition will be shown with, among others, Louisa Clement, Viktoria Binschtok and Sinta Werner. Hannah Hallermann, one of the most popular artists in Berlin, is exhibiting in the Miettinen Collection. This year it also means saying goodbye. The Julia Stoschek Foundation is taking part in Berlin Art Week for the last time. After ten years, the Düsseldorf collector of “time-based art” is closing her branch in Berlin in the fall.
Such departures are a reminder that Berlin shouldn't be too confident in its creative appeal. What made the city a center of attraction for an international art scene in the 1990s is not a property. This also applies to the state museums. They could provide art historical support to a festival that primarily shows contemporary art and aims to reach a younger audience. The Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Aktuell is staging the first retrospective of the experimental composer and sound artist Ryuichi Sakamoto in Europe (opening on September 10th).
However, the Gemäldegalerie and the Alte Nationalgalerie miss the date and will only open their upcoming exhibitions on portraits from Botticelli to Lempicka as well as the “long 19th century” after Berlin Art Week. The Neue Nationalgalerie, on the other hand, has recognized the appeal of its newly renovated building and is once again making it the central meeting point of the art week with a five-day performance program. The exhibition “Night” by Maurizio Cattelan, which opens promptly next Wednesday, can also be called appropriately populist.
Cattelan is known for cartoon-like sculptures such as the Pope struck down by a stone, Hitler kneeling as if in prayer, and a banana stuck to the wall. The latter is either misunderstood and eaten up performatively or auctioned off as a conceptual work of art for millions. So perhaps it is only logical to enhance the comedian of the commercial art world with a museum exhibition.
Or the real point is that the Berlin art world would rather be ridiculed by no one than by an artist whose ridicule increases their own market value.
Berlin Art Week will take place from September 9th to 13th, 2026.
