Malte, 2026
Sophie von Hellermann
Wentrup
“Painting is dead, long live painting!” could be the motto of the 2026 Gallery Weekend Berlin. The event was founded in 2005 by a cooperative of local gallerists as an alternative to traditional art fairs that typically favor painting, yet the strong presence of the medium this year confirms its lasting power.
Following on its founders’ original idea to draw collectors to Berlin in a single coordinated art smorgasbord, the weekend kicks off with over 50 galleries spread across the city. In parallel, there are other major draws like the American digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelman) presenting robotic dogs with human heads (from Andy Warhol to tech tycoon Elon Musk) in “Beeple. Regular Animals,” at Neue Nationalgalerie. Elsewhere, Gropius Bau has a major show by the renowned performance artist Marina Abramović, “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a multiscreen video installation exploring mythic rituals and sexual energies.
Another big moment for Berlin’s art scene is the reopening of the Boros Collection’s vast bunker of contemporary art from the ’90s to the present, starting May 3rd. Plus, the luxury department store KaDeWe dresses its windows with a 24/7 pop-up show of multimedia and kinetic art by eleven artists, including Talking Heads musician and artist David Byrne, conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), and New York–based multimedia and performance artist Kayode Ojo.
Here are 8 of the most anticipated gallery shows during Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Tauba Auerbach
“Easy Assembly”
Esther Schipper
May 1–June 20
American artist Tauba Auerbach, who works in diverse media spanning painting, weaving, and sculpture, investigates sight and the limits of perception in their piercingly bright paintings. For instance, the New York–based artist’s first exhibition at Esther Schipper in 2013, “Tetrachromat,” centered on works inspired by colors outside the standard RGB spectrum. These colors are only seen by people—usually women—possessing four (rather than the normal three) retinal cones: a condition known as tetrachromacy.
Guided by a similar curiosity around the science of perception, Auerbach presents a series of Pointillist acrylic paintings in their second show with the gallery. These depict foam textures and investigate the role that chance plays in how foam particles interact with surfaces as they merge, collide, and break apart.
Vivien Zhang
“Field Conditions”
Galerie Max Hetzler (Goethestr.)
Apr. 30–June 27
Chance also informs the highly textured, rhythmic acrylic-and-oil paintings by rising artist Vivien Zhang, who has her debut solo show at Galerie Max Hetzler. Inspired by diverse biological sources, from flower patterns and nearly extinct plants to butterflies, the London-based artist ties perception to geopolitical considerations.
For instance, the geometric background in the painting slip between (Ithomia) (2026) refers to the 1909 “Butterfly” World Map. This projection was designed to translate the globe into two dimensions in a more proportionate way to viewers, which results in less bias in the size (and significance) of Western nations.
Robert Elfgen
“utopisch”
Sprüth Magers
May 2–Aug. 1
Acclaimed artist Robert Elfgen studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 2000s under the renowned conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel. Since then, he’s become known for his Romantic-inspired paintings which draw from the natural world and have been shown at major galleries such as Marian Boesky and reside in collections like the Rubells’. His presentation at Sprüth Magers consists of sculptural and mixed-media works, including floor pieces and glass panes. His photocollages, sprayed with metallic paint and with added concrete and brass, are partially sanded down, giving them a grainy texture. The industrial landscapes they depict—liminal spaces with barren countryside and chimneys and rigs—feel equally scuffed and “collaged.” Elfgen paints a warm yellow-and-orange haze into these scenes, bathing the manmade deserts in ethereal light, hauntingly still and devoid of activity. Here and there, a lonely dachshund bears shadowy witness to industrial waste.
A utopia of progress? Doubtful: Elfgen’s wistfully post-Romantic vision suggests that the show’s title is rather darkly ironic. Perhaps there’s a hint of latent longing here, as Germany’s bustling towns turn to ghosts following the decline of industry.
Rodney McMillian
“In Other Realms”
Capitain Petzel
Apr. 29–June 13.
Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian is known for incorporating everyday objects, such as blankets, chairs, and architectural debris, into his abstract paintings and sculptures with rugged textures that allude to the bodily experience of racial and social inequality in America.
In his inaugural solo show at Capitain Petzel, Rodney McMillian deploys acrylic paint and mixed media in a Postminimalist fashion to blur the line between abstraction and representation. The show follows his 2024 exhibition, “The Land: Not Without a Politic,” at the Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany (which was his first in the country).
Accordingly, the show at Capitain Petzel includes heavily layered acrylic-and-latex paintings from the “Black Painting” series, as well as misshapen sculptures, such as Untitled (Knoll’s Chair) (2023–26), a combined sculpture made of a chair, fabric, wire, and acrylic. Also included is a film work, based on a text by early American civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who fought to end lynchings of Black Americans.
Bernd Koberling
“Rooted in Time, Rooted in the Sky, Paintings 1992-2026”
Buchmann Galerie
May 1–June 20
Duft der Steine, 2019
Bernd Koberling
Buchmann Galerie
Momentane Vision 11, 2025
Bernd Koberling
Buchmann Galerie
At 88, Bernd Koberling is one of the most renowned living post-war German painters. And the works from his mid-to-late career, shown at Buchmann Galerie, evidence his continued reinvention. He was part of the 1980s Cologne-based Neo-Expressionist art movement Junge Wilde, the members of which opposed the cool rationalism of minimalist art with a messier, gestural approach. At Buchmann Galerie, this style is highlighted in paintings like the oil Erdstelle (1992), notable for its darkly brooding palette and agitated strokes.
By contrast, his more recent works presented in the show—for example, the oil-on-wood work Echo (2024), with rhythmic flickers of bright colors (mostly parakeet green)—are much airier. Elsewhere, in the “Aquarelle” series, Momentane Vision (2025) conveys a keen interest in color, inspired by the Arctic region—he’s frequently visited Iceland, Scotland, and Lapland—particularly its rugged landscapes and diaphanous light.
“Hyperacuity”
Bode
Apr. 30–June 21.
From Abundance, He Took Abundance, 2026
Alteronce Gumby
Bode
Sitting on the moving box, 2025
Teresa Murta
Bode
Though diverse in their approaches and supports, the artists in “Hyperacuity,” a group show at Bode Gallery, all experiment with the means of “polluting” painting, expanding its pictorial possibilities.
For instance, the Bronx, New York–based abstract painter Alteronce Gumby—a 2016 graduate of the Yale School of Art—is fascinated equally by chromatic painting and astrophysics. He combines glass, blue quartz, and acrylic in his densely patterned works. Another Yale MFA graduate, Gabriel Mills, who was 2021’s resident artist at MASS MoCA, shows his panels oscillating between heavy impasto and smudgy blurs. Meanwhile the young Portuguese Berlin-based artist Teresa Murta creates paintings with nervously blobby lines that produce a visual confusion.
Together, the show suggests that “hyperacuity” is a kind of oversaturation.
Sophie von Hellerman
“Letters to a young painter”
Wentrup
May 1–June 12
Paula Modersohn Becker malt Rilke in Paris, 2026
Sophie von Hellermann
Wentrup
The German mid-career painter Sophie von Hellermann revives the country’s legacies of Romantic and Expressionist art in her fluid acrylic works. In her works, which are shown by galleries such as Pilar Corrias and Greene Naftali, she often turns to dream and fantasy, with supple and agile lines, pulsing with energy. Recently, she has also portrayed art history, as in her vibrant 2024 mural for the Brücke Museum, Berlin, depicting Jewish art collectors tied to the museum’s history who were persecuted by the Nazis.
Her fourth solo show at Wentrup takes its title from poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1929 book, Letters to a Young Poet. Here the England-based artist’s febrile landscapes in pure pigment convey Romanticism’s fascination with nature. Other works, for example, Paula Modersohn Becker paints Rilke in Paris (2026) (referring to the pioneering German Expressionist woman painter and Rilke’s close friend) reimagine scenes from the poet’s life.
James Turrell
“sensing fields”
Max Goelitz
May 1–July 4.
Consumed by the desire to capture light’s full effects on the mind since the 1960s, James Turrell has become famous for large site-specific installations in far-flung locations. For decades, he’s been involved with constructing an enormous sky observatory at the Roden Crater, in the Arizona desert, for example.
As part of his highly anticipated show, “sensing fields,” at Max Goelitz, the American artist brings to Berlin for the first time a work from his acclaimed “Glass” series (2001–present), Small Elliptical Glass First Cause (2024), in which visitors can see a glass plane, embedded in a wall, radiating a purple computer-programmed light.
“My work is not so much about my seeing as about your seeing…. You are looking at you looking,” he once said in an interview. His works, which at Max Goelitz also include aquatint etchings (Turrell thinks of them as afterimages of light’s glow) and a skyscape sculpture, highlight the subjectivity of vision as a space of self-awareness and contemplation, bypassing conscious thought.
