Berlin remains a mecca for contemporary art, and summer only confirms it. Iconic exhibitions appear inside even more iconic architectural spaces, like Anton Corbijn’s show inside the former squat Tacheles, transformed by Swiss architecture icons Herzog & de Meuron. Beyond that, Berlin also delivers plenty of surprises within the most current art scene. Here are the exhibitions worth your time.
Brancusi, Neue Nationalgalerie
This marks the first major retrospective dedicated to this sculptor in Germany in fifty years, organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition takes place inside the Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose glass hall creates an unusually open, light-filled space for Brancusi’s sculptures. If you’re curious how abstraction in sculpture even came about, this is exactly where you’ll see its roots gathered together.
Fujiko Nakaya, Sculpture Garden, Neue Nationalgalerie
This fog sculpture by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya returns due to overwhelming public interest. Right now, Nakaya also has work on view in Paris, where her fog installation Cloud #07156 fills the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, the Pinault Collection space designed by Tadao Ando.
The Berlin work stays tied directly to its location, shifting with the weather and time of day, so you’ll never see quite the same view twice. That’s exactly why it’s worth visiting right now, in summer, when the fog takes on an entirely different character in evening light than it does in winter.
Paul Signac, Museum Barberini, Potsdam
This marks the first comprehensive Paul Signac exhibition in Germany in decades. Across nearly a hundred works, it traces his path from early coastal landscapes through interiors and portraits to his utopian visions of the French Riviera. Thirty of Signac’s works also sit in dialogue with pieces by Seurat, Pissarro, and other Neo-Impressionists here, so you see not just the artist himself, but the entire movement he helped shape. The exhibition runs through October 11.
The exhibition Balkan Erotic Epic at Gropius Bau focuses on the artist’s long-standing interest in ritual, eroticism, death, and the body as a site of political resistance, and its run has been extended through August 30. This year, Abramović also holds a historic exhibition in Venice, Transforming Energy at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, where, marking her eightieth birthday, she became the first living artist the institution has ever honored with such a large solo show.
Anton Corbijn, Fotografiska Berlin
Corbijn celebrates his seventieth birthday this year, alongside fifty years in the profession. This retrospective at Fotografiska Berlin presents nearly two hundred of his works, including portraits of Depeche Mode, U2, Tom Waits, and Marlene Dumas. As a result, the exhibition doubles as a visual history of the last forty years of music, not just a gallery of portraits.
It runs through September 20 at Oranienburger Str. 60, inside the former Kunsthaus Tacheles complex, whose renovation Herzog & de Meuron led. Studio Aisslinger designed the museum’s interior itself. Meanwhile, original graffiti from the Tacheles art initiative era remains deliberately preserved as part of the building’s heritage protection.
Walter Schels, 16° Pisces, C/O Berlin
To mark the photographer’s ninetieth birthday, C/O Berlin and the F. C. Gundlach Foundation organized his very first retrospective in Berlin. If you’re curious how the German photographic perspective of the second half of the twentieth century took shape, you’ll find a full cross-section of his career here.
Intermezzo: Revisiting Helmut Newton, Museum für Fotografie
This new permanent exhibition dedicated to Helmut and June Newton engages with different facets of their photographic work more dynamically than before. It offers a genuinely good opportunity to see how curatorial perspective on the same archival work can shift over time.
Many Shades of Grès, Bauhaus-Archiv
This exhibition focuses on French designer Madame Grès, one of the twentieth century’s most significant haute couture pioneers. It shows exactly how fashion can transform into art, specifically through pattern cutting technique, not merely through surface style.
Saâdane Afif, Five Preludes, Hamburger Bahnhof
The central work here is the multi-part piece The Fountain Archives, which Afif donated to the Nationalgalerie in 2023. It’s presented to the public for the first time here, making this a genuine premiere rather than just another installation.
Kaspar Müller, SOCIÉTÉ
In the installation Boutique SOCIÉTÉ × Treasures of Memory 2, this Swiss artist explores the gap between what an object appears to be and what it keeps hidden for itself. At the center stand two tents dressed in hand-painted transparent fabric, joined by lamp sculptures and hand-blown glass bongs set on a rotating pedestal. Part of the exhibition also includes Müller’s paintings, created by feeding personal memories into an AI image generator, which makes them a fascinating test case for how technology today reshapes even something as personal as memory. The exhibition runs through August 29 at Wielandstraße 26.
Where Else to Go During the Day
For an early morning start, consider swimming at Sommerbad Olympiastadion, a pool built between 1934 and 1935 directly as part of the Olympic grounds for the 1936 Summer Olympics. Swimming competitions took place here at the time, and the original stands for 7,500 spectators still stand today.
More Exhibitions
Lina Lapelytė: We Make Years Out of Hours
Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land
Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic
