The 12 best gallery shows in Berlin in October 2026

The first exhibition of Walter Dahn’s work since his death, and a survey of three decades, from 1982 to 2014. Dahn went to the Düsseldorf academy at seventeen to study under Joseph Beuys, moved to Cologne in 1976 and became one of the wild young painters of the early 1980s, working beside Dokoupil, Rosemarie Trockel and Sigmar Polke. The show has the large spray paintings of 1984, Baselitz-Pop and Baechler-Blues, the sparse, childlike Weltkriegshirsch, and the later work in which painting, silkscreen, photography and drawing count as equals, always with an ear for music and pop.

The title work, of 2006, takes off from a Nadar caricature of Painting and Photography. Through December 19 on Oranienburger Straße, with Salvo’s night paintings in the window space until October 24, and a panel on Dahn at the gallery on October 8 at 5:30 pm.

In 1969, while she was a student of Beuys in Düsseldorf, Katharina Sieverding made a twenty-nine-minute film with three other performers about identity as something that changes: male and female, life and death, held in tension. It was shown at documenta 5 in 1972, with a soundtrack Kraftwerk recorded for it in a single improvised session, and it is the center of this exhibition, with the photographic series drawn from it, each a hundred centimeters square, the twelve-part Hanging Boots of 1969 and the two-part Transformer of 1973–74.

Sieverding has spent nearly sixty years on the idea that identity is a transformation, not a fact, and this is where it starts. At Charlottenstraße 24 through November 7; Kerstin Brätsch has the corner room.

Alix Cléo Roubaud took up photography in the summer of 1979 and died in 1983, at thirty-one. In August 1980, over at least ten days in a painter’s studio in the south-west of France, she set her camera on a tripod, marked the frame on the floor and moved naked through the light of a single window during exposures of ten to thirty seconds. She spent months printing the seventeen images of Si quelque chose noir, If Something Black, made each print unique and destroyed the negatives. In the last she lies, half transparent, across the body of her husband, the poet Jacques Roubaud.

This is the first exhibition of her work in Germany, curated by the writer Hélène Giannecchini, with twenty-eight photographs in all. At Galerie Buchholz on Fasanenstraße through October 31.

Red yellow blue dust: Sabine Moritz’s first exhibition with Max Hetzler is built on twelve large oil paintings in four groups of three, named for earth, air, water and fire. For a decade her painting was abstract, dense fields of worked color; since 2023 the body has come back, and in her first four-part painting, Fragment einer Idylle, female figures surface from the paint. One still life, with three skulls, is called Teach us to number our days.

Upstairs are works on paper from three decades, among them the Helikopter drawings of 2009–12 and the recent Meditations about war. Through October 31 in the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße; a show of hers opens at the Garden Museum in London on October 8.

Five new mobiles, in the artist’s first exhibition with Esther Schipper. They look like Calder’s and are made of war: brass artillery shells salvaged in Vietnam, where unexploded ordnance still kills, engraved, hung from steel cable with wooden clappers and tuned so that they ring at frequencies said to heal. The series grew out of Nguyen’s 2022 film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, in which a character turns bombs into bells, and takes its title from the Buddha’s sermon on fire.

Through October 24 on the top floor of the Mercator Höfe. In the next rooms, David Claerbout’s Repose shows four video works new to Berlin, one of which lasts almost twenty-five hours.

Carrie Mae Weems has two exhibitions in Berlin this autumn. The large one is The Heart of the Matter at C/O Berlin, more than a hundred photographs and videos from four decades, the Kitchen Table Series among them. The new work is here, at her Berlin gallery: Seaside, large photographs of the artist seen from behind at an easel on an Atlantic beach while the pages of her sketchbook blow away, and The Law of Diminishing Returns, five oval-framed photographs in descending sizes, on migration and displacement.

It is Weems’s fourth show with Barbara Thumm, on Markgrafenstraße in Kreuzberg through October 31; the C/O retrospective runs to February 3. In the gallery’s other room, Fiona Banner shows sculptures made from fighter-jet parts.

Jeremy Shaw, the Canadian artist who lives in Berlin, has long made work about altered states, and his first exhibition with Galerie Neu does it with objects. In the first room are three Klein bottles, the one-sided vessel of mathematics, in flame-worked glass, each holding the residue of vaporized DMT. In the second, twenty-eight zinc pipes from a church organ of 1959, taken out of service, hang on the wall, each in a hand-blown sleeve of uranium glass; hidden ultraviolet light makes the glass glow green in a pattern timed to the sound.

Science, a retired instrument of worship and mildly radioactive glass: the materials carry the argument about belief. On Linienstraße through November 7.

Martin Margiela left fashion in 2008 and has worked as an artist since, in the same spirit: anonymous, exact, interested in what is covered and what is missing. This is his first exhibition with Konrad Fischer and his first in Germany. He has closed off parts of the gallery with new walls and painter’s sheeting, and shows sculptures made from everyday things, coat hangers, tiles, carpet, a pallet; the largest, Audience, is a block of stacked cinema seats whose upholstery has been replaced by plaster casts.

On Neue Grünstraße, in Mitte, through December 19, which makes it one of the few shows of the season still on in the winter. Alan Charlton’s Circle Paintings share the building.

Two installations of moving image and multichannel sound, from the project Wu Tsang has been developing for several years around Carmen: Bizet’s opera of 1875 and the long afterlife of its heroine in music, theater and film. La gran mentira de la muerte dates from 2024; On our way to the general strike, from this year, is shown in Europe for the first time.

It is Tsang’s third exhibition with Isabella Bortolozzi, after shows in 2014 and 2021, in the gallery’s rooms on Schöneberger Ufer, by the canal. Through October 31; the gallery opens at noon.

New paintings of tall, sloping figures in rooms, performing the small ceremonies of a day: sitting in high-backed chairs, gathering at a table, lifting a glass. Weaver builds her grounds in layers and paints the final image in one wet session, in cobalt blues she took from Mycenaean frescoes; the figures have the outlines of the ancient vessels they hold. The title is the Greek for placing side by side, and it describes the exhibition, which is in two galleries at once.

Part is at Max Hetzler’s apartment gallery on Bleibtreustraße, in Charlottenburg, and part at Soy Capitán on Lindenstraße, in Kreuzberg. Both through October 24.

The first of these to close, on October 17. The Philadelphia painter’s subject is Aleijadinho, the eighteenth-century Brazilian sculptor whose biography is part record and part legend, and whose soapstone prophets stand outside the church at Congonhas. White paints them, and the woodcut imagery of the cheap printed booklets of north-east Brazil, in acrylic, rubber, pigment and spray paint worked through screen mesh. The question is how an uncertain story hardens into history.

His second show with Capitain Petzel fills the glass pavilion on Karl-Marx-Allee, a building worth the trip on its own.