On the Ground at Gallery Weekend Berlin

The city was in full spring bloom during the public days of Gallery Weekend Berlin—but ChertLüdde‘s Alvaro Urbano show “September and Lions” was a sharp contrast that, in some ways, fit the underlying atmosphere of the city. The installation of end-of-season park foliage, cigarette butts, delicately crafted from metal, was rooted in melancholic introspection. It would be a lie to say things have been easy breezy in Berlin in recent months. Quite the opposite: There were deep cuts to the cultural sector, and politics have been causing divisions in the art world. Plus, there’s a new, more right-leaning government and cultural minister to reckon with.

Guests, fresh from Cyprien Gaillard’s video installation “Retinal Rivalry,” dumped their 3D glasses in a bin and gathered at the garden apéro at Sprüth Magers, sipping wine and discussing the sudden resignation of Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture minister. His exit followed a cascade of public missteps and was made worse by the announcement that €130 million in cultural funding was to be cut from the city’s budget. While this doesn’t directly impact the gallery space, the ripple effect is undeniable. Institutions are rattled, and uncertainty—never great for business—hangs in the air, especially in austerity-minded Germany.

But no matter. Gallery Weekend Berlin buzzed anyway, infused with a mood of resilience, even defiance. We dance on.

In an unusual twist, the event kicked off on May Day, a national bank holiday for International Workers’ Day. For the art industry, “working” meant oysters and air kissing on the patio of KaDeWe, the historic multistory department store usually teeming with tourists bent over perfume vitrines. The large arcade windows of the building were taken over by galleries. Pamela Rosenkranz’s water bottles, filled with flesh-toned silicone and acrylic paint, stood on plinths where Etro resort wear might normally be displayed—at comparable price points.

Now in her second year, Antonia Ruder seems to have found her stride at the helm of Gallery Weekend, after taking over last year after the departure Maike Cruse, who headed to Art Basel in Switzerland. Ruder inherited a platform of 55 galleries and a rocky market. “The global art market has become much more competitive,” she said in a recent interview with the German press. “Berlin remains a major player thanks to its unique art scene, but staying relevant means continuously taking action.” Her updates to the format this year were well received: Alongside the 24-hour window project at KaDeWe was a series of artist talks at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a podcast lifting the veil on studio practices, helmed columnist Enuma Okoro, and expanded public tours.

Things will seem normal, but there will be signs. First, the normal: Everyone I spoke to, from dealers to artists and collectors, noted that the event felt international again after a post-lockdown lull and competition for attention with the Venice Biennale last year. We even had an A-list celebrity: Usher, who collects art, was seen in a Berlin-looking trench coat enjoying seasonal asparagus at the Gallery Weekend dinner—hosted within LAS Art Foundation‘s exhibition of Laure Prouvost—though the star allegedly had to leave before dessert (understandable given that he had to perform at the Met Gala on Monday evening). An internationally established blue-chip gallery was scrambling to get its star artist on the guest list of Berghain for Saturday night. Collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt said an invite to artist Zuzanna Czebatul‘s after-party at Berghain, hosted by her gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem had “sealed the deal” on deciding to come. Some things don’t change.

But there are signs that the before times are no more. Gone are the days when Gallery Weekend was dominated by painting-only shows by the most established rostered artists working on canvas; many exhibitions instead favored experimentation. In these , all directions are favorable. At Galerie Neu, a cheekily opaque show prompted some visiting children to throw around colorful bits of SoiL Thornton‘s pom-pom installation and some even pocketed them. This later seemed ominous when I learned that each pom-pom in the exhibition represented one year of the artist’s life.

“You have to be flexible, but you can also be more playful,” said Noah Klink, a dealer in his third Gallery Weekend. He was showing a suite of ink drawings by Sebastian Jefford, plus ochre roof material custom-fitted to the interior walls of his gallery, on which moonlike faces gazed out. Berlin has yet to recover the “brand” it had during the apex of post-internet art in the late 2010s (some of those artists reappeared in a brief revival in 2022). But the city’s lack of a unified scene may now be its strength. It is diverse, varied, and allows space for experimentation in a place that remains an incubator for artists.

There were some key posthumous discoveries on this front. Many recommended David Medalla‘s “Luftbrücke” at Mountains, a show with more institutional muscle and ideas than it could fit on the walls. The gallery expanded into a nearby space, a former apothecary, to show the breadth of an artist who worked for a time in West Berlin. The kinetic art pioneer, who died in 2020, left a vast oeuvre that includes paintings, neon sculpture, and delicate collages. His ethereal bubbling sculpture, called , pours over itself at Julia Stoschek Collection‘s post-image group exhibition; a cascade that signaled to me a needed return to what one might call poetic artists’s art. Similarly, Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti brought the ephemeral, playful, and profound fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya to the Neue Nationalgalerie‘s historic sculpture garden.

Beyond the official program, new formats proliferated that brought together sharp curation and business-oriented projects. Noah Klink hosted a group show “Soggiorno” at Tanya Leighton. At a historic church in Mitte, collector, curator, and now art advisor Tiffany Zabludowicz and curator and advisor Anneli Botz launched their debut exhibition under the banner of their new platform Tyger Tyger; the large group show “I Sought my Soul” brought together works by artists including Jacolby Satterwhite, Jean-Marie Appriou, and Mire Lee. Optimism for the current age was the operative word—and the exhibition included an immersive breathwork session during Gallery Weekend. The first in a series, the multihyphenate enterprise to help private collectors and institutions curate and build their collections. “Why not be hybridized, as long as it is additive to the art world?” said Zabludowicz.

Also choosing Berlin: American Art Projects presented “America Unframed,” a tightly curated selling exhibition of well-selected artists from overlapping scenes between L.A., New York, and other American hubs. Organizers Benno Tubbesing (of Ruttkowski 68), Matthieu von Matt, and William Croghan (of Deitch) said they plan to continue the series, spotlighting a new generation of American artists who’ve been underexposed outside of the U.S. Artists like painters Tristan Unrau, who recently gained representation from David Kordanksy, and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., who had a solo show at Deitch in New York that closed this January, hung together as a visual lexicon of Americana, drawing on Pop Art, realism, vernacular signage, cinema, and online visual culture.

New models are also taking shape on the institutional front. The most visible sign may be the Chanel-backed commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, launched with a monumental work by Klára Hosnedlová. The 12 percent cut to Berlin’s cultural funding likely accelerated the need for an increase in these partnerships. German museums will now be asked to reconsider not only how they fund—but what they fund.

Across Europe, art sales are down 8 percent year over year, and sales are vital—no one disputes that. Institutions partnering with private patrons; selling exhibitions framed as such but with curatorial depth; all this no longer feels un-Berlin; nor does a heterogeneous set of artists pushing past genre toward a poetics of presence. We are seeing some sort of paradigm shift—one still hazy at the edges, but unmistakably underway. Perhaps, taken together, it will someday read as a slow, accumulative response to political inertia, market fatigue, and evolving social priorities.

Things can be much more imaginative, provisional, and porous, and more poetic than polished, too. At KW Institute on Sunday morning, artist Matt Copson and critic Dean Kissick hosted a panel styled after Art Basel’s Conversations series with three nine-year-old guests; together they earnestly discussed the meaning of art. The kids and the two adults on stage spoke, with startling directness, about what art meant to them; a reminder of what an individual and immediate experience art viewing can be. One European collector, singularly rattled by this, demanded to know what the event was to be. But Copson had already turned that question to his panelists, asking the children whether the conversation itself could be an artwork. There was no firm consensus. And that, perhaps, is the point. Maybe uncertain times have taught us something that was always true—that all directions, all interpretations, are favorable.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com