The 12 best art galleries in Berlin

Monika Sprüth opened her gallery in Cologne in 1983 and made it the place where Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Rosemarie Trockel were shown in Germany; Philomene Magers opened hers in Bonn in 1991, and the two merged in 1998. Berlin has been the gallery’s home since 2008, in a former dance hall on Oranienburger Straße, in Mitte, with galleries in London, Los Angeles and New York. The list, more than seventy artists and estates, also takes in the Düsseldorf photographers, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Bernd and Hilla Becher, with Thomas Demand, Fischli and Weiss, George Condo, Ed Ruscha, Anne Imhof, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker and Kraftwerk.

Three shows share the building. The main one, through December 19, is the first exhibition of Walter Dahn’s work since his death, three decades of painting, spray paint and silkscreen from 1982 to 2014. Jean-Luc Mylayne’s photographs of birds and, in the window space on the street, Salvo’s paintings of the city at night both close on October 24. A panel on Dahn is at the gallery on October 8 at 5:30 pm, by registration.

Esther Schipper opened in Cologne in 1989, with a show of General Idea, and moved to Berlin for good in 1997. Hers is the gallery of the artists who, in the 1990s, turned the exhibition itself into a medium: Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch and Tino Sehgal have shown with her for many years, alongside Hito Steyerl, Anri Sala, Ugo Rondinone, Ryan Gander, Simon Fujiwara, Rosa Barba, Ann Veronica Janssens, Karin Sander, Camille Henrot and Anicka Yi. In 2015 she took over Johnen Galerie, and the gallery then moved to the top floor of the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße, a former print shop and warehouse converted with the architect Annabelle Selldorf; it also has galleries in Paris, on the Place Vendôme, and in Seoul.

Two exhibitions run until October 24. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in his first show with the gallery, hangs five mobiles made from brass artillery shells salvaged in Vietnam and tuned to ring; David Claerbout shows four video works new to Berlin, one of them nearly twenty-five hours long. Sara Cwynar opens on November 5.

No gallery in Berlin has a room like König’s. Johann König founded the gallery in 2002 and in May 2015 moved it into St. Agnes, a Brutalist church in Kreuzberg designed by Werner Düttmann and built between 1964 and 1967; the conversion, by the architect Arno Brandlhuber, won the Berlin Architecture Prize in 2016. Exhibitions hang in the concrete nave, the chapel and the vault, with a sculpture garden outside, and the gallery is open on Sundays. Its list has changed in recent years and now includes Erwin Wurm, Jeppe Hein, Julian Opie, Stephan Balkenhol, K. H. Hödicke, Monira Al Qadiri, Daniel Arsham, Anselm Reyle, Xenia Hausner, Joana Vasconcelos and Ayako Rokkaku; a second gallery is in Seoul.

Three solo shows run to November 8: Christian Achenbach’s paintings in the nave, with a monumental canvas made for it, Monira Al Qadiri’s Egyptian gods, video and virtual reality in the chapel, and Rebecca Brodskis’s portraits of the friends she lived among in Berlin in the mid-2000s in the vault. The sculpture garden, with Hein, Wurm and Balkenhol, can be seen on the gallery’s guided tours.

Max Hetzler opened in Stuttgart in 1974, moved to Cologne in 1983, where he became the dealer of Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Günther Förg, and has been in Berlin since 1993, longer than almost any gallery of his rank. After Zimmerstraße and Wedding, the gallery opened its main Berlin space in 2021 in the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße: 600 square meters behind a glass front, in the hall where the Tagesspiegel was once printed. A second gallery is in an apartment on Bleibtreustraße, in Charlottenburg, and there are others in Paris, London and Marfa, Texas. The list runs from Oehlen, Förg and Kippenberger to Katharina Grosse, Bridget Riley, Sean Scully, Thomas Struth, Rineke Dijkstra, Christopher Wool, Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Rebecca Warren and Edmund de Waal.

Until October 31 the Potsdamer Straße gallery has Sabine Moritz’s first exhibition with Hetzler, twelve large oils named for the four elements. Bleibtreustraße has Grace Weaver’s Parataxis, shared with Soy Capitán in Kreuzberg, until October 24. Sean Scully’s Block opens on November 20.

Daniel Buchholz founded his gallery in Cologne in 1986 and runs it with Christopher Müller; the Berlin gallery opened in 2008 on Fasanenstraße, the most elegant street in Charlottenburg, and a New York one followed in 2015. Buchholz is the artists’ gallery among the big ones, known for exhibitions that read like arguments and for the care of its publications. Wolfgang Tillmans and Isa Genzken have shown with it for decades, with Tomma Abts, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Henrik Olesen, Lucy McKenzie, Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Leckey, Moyra Davey, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Trisha Donnelly, Vincent Fecteau, Sherrie Levine, Frances Stark and the estates of Lutz Bacher, Tony Conrad, Paul Thek and Martin Wong.

The current show is typical of it: the first exhibition in Germany of Alix Cléo Roubaud, the photographer and writer who died in 1983 at thirty-one, curated by Hélène Giannecchini around the seventeen unique prints of Si quelque chose noir. Through October 31.

Capitain Petzel is a joint venture of two dealers, Gisela Capitain of Cologne and Friedrich Petzel of New York, who opened it in 2008 in the most unlikely building of any gallery in the city: a glass-walled modernist pavilion on Karl-Marx-Allee, the grand boulevard of East Berlin, built in 1964 to designs by Josef Kaiser and Walter Franek as Kunst im Heim, a showroom for art and design from the socialist countries. The 1,300 square meters of open floor and daylight suit large exhibitions, and the artists come from both parents: Charline von Heyl, Maria Lassnig, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Zoe Leonard, Christopher Williams, Robert Longo, Monica Bonvicini, Georg Herold, Matt Mullican, Barbara Bloom, Andrea Bowers, Karla Black and Sanya Kantarovsky.

Austin Martin White’s second show with the gallery fills the whole building until October 17: paintings and works on paper about Aleijadinho, the Brazilian Baroque sculptor whose life is half record and half legend. The Berlinische Galerie has a retrospective of Josef Kaiser, the pavilion’s architect, this season.

Bruno Brunnet and Nicole Hackert have run Contemporary Fine Arts, CFA to everyone, since 1992. It began in Charlottenburg, moved to Mitte, spent some years in David Chipperfield’s gallery building by Museum Island, and in 2016 came back to Charlottenburg, to Grolmanstraße, off Savignyplatz. The gallery is the Berlin address for painting with attitude: Georg Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz, Sarah Lucas, Raymond Pettibon, Juergen Teller, Christian Jankowski, Donna Huanca, Emily Mae Smith, Ulrike Ottinger, Katja Strunz and Gert and Uwe Tobias, with the estates of Norbert Schwontkowski, Walter Pichler, Christa Dichgans and Dash Snow.

Until October 24 the gallery has Leiko Ikemura’s de sensu, new paintings and sculptures in green-walled rooms lit to suggest day turning to night, and drawings and sculptures by the Austrian Walter Pichler, installed by his daughter. Dana Schutz’s The Department opens on November 7.

Alexander Schröder and Thilo Wermke started Galerie Neu in Mitte in the mid-1990s to show their own generation, Kai Althoff, Manfred Pernice, Daniel Pflumm and Josephine Pryde among them, and thirty years later it is still the gallery where Berlin’s artists go to see what their peers are doing. It has one space, on Linienstraße, where it moved in 2014, and its list is one other galleries envy: Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Anne Collier, Jana Euler, Cerith Wyn Evans, Louis Fratino, Yngve Holen, Sergej Jensen, John Knight, Klara Lidén, Victor Man, Andreas Slominski, Reena Spaulings and Bernadette Corporation.

The current exhibition, through November 7, is Jeremy Shaw’s first with the gallery: three glass Klein bottles that hold the residue of vaporized DMT, and a wall of twenty-eight organ pipes from a decommissioned church organ, each sleeved in uranium glass that glows green in time with the sound.

Thomas Schulte’s was one of the first galleries to open in Berlin after reunification, in 1991, as Franck + Schulte, and it has shown American Minimal and Conceptual art here ever since. Since 2006 it has been at Charlottenstraße 24, in Mitte, behind a three-part shop window that the architect Hermann Muthesius added to the building in 1913, and in 2024 it opened a second space in the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße. The gallery works with the estates of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Mapplethorpe, Fred Sandback and Rebecca Horn, and with Pat Steir, Allan McCollum, Richard Deacon, Alfredo Jaar, Jonathan Lasker, Juan Uslé, Robert Wilson, Hamish Fulton, Idris Khan, Angela de la Cruz and Katharina Sieverding.

Sieverding’s Life–Death, through November 7, centers on her film of 1969, shown at documenta 5 with a soundtrack by Kraftwerk, with the photographic series that came out of it. Kerstin Brätsch has the corner room, and David L. Johnson the Potsdamer Straße space. Note that the gallery opens at noon.

Marie-Blanche Carlier and Ulrich Gebauer have directed their gallery since 1991, and it occupies a former industrial shed in Kreuzberg’s old newspaper district, on Markgrafenstraße; a second gallery opened in Madrid in 2019. The program is strong in film, photography and installation, and in artists who came to it early: Julie Mehretu, Thomas Schütte, Paul Graham, Richard Mosse, Laure Prouvost, Mark Wallinger, Aernout Mik, Michel François, Paul Pfeiffer, Emily Wardill, Iman Issa, Tarik Kiswanson, Ming Wong, Asta Gröting, Oscar Muñoz and Cecilia Edefalk.

Three exhibitions fill the hall. Lúcia Koch’s New Systems (For Relationships), curtain rails hung with translucent printed fabric that visitors walk through, and the group show Shine a Light both close on October 28; Animal Mirror, fifteen artists on people and animals, with Schütte’s Praying Dog, runs to November 14. Barbara Thumm is next door.

Barbara Thumm studied art in London among the Young British Artists, came to Berlin in the 1990s and opened her gallery in 1997; after Auguststraße and Dircksenstraße it is now on Markgrafenstraße in Kreuzberg, next door to carlier | gebauer. The program is international and openly feminist, two-thirds of its artists are women, and it has stood by careers that museums came to late: Fiona Banner, who has been with the gallery from the start, Carrie Mae Weems, Jo Baer, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and the estate of the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga, with Theo Eshetu, El Hadji Sy, Antonio Paucar, Roméo Mivekannin and Kaloki Nyamai.

Both rooms are strong until October 31: Banner’s Poems for Helicopter Blades, video and sound sculptures made from parts of decommissioned military aircraft, and new photographs by Weems, shown while her retrospective is at C/O Berlin. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, from noon.