31 October 2026
Most big autumn shows open within a fortnight. On 9 October Lovis Corinth, who like most Berliners came from elsewhere, reaches the Berlinische Galerie, and Schlingensief the Gropius Bau. A week later the Gemäldegalerie hangs five centuries of portraits, Botticelli to Lempicka, and the Deutsches Historisches Museum sets colonial beside Nazi violence. Madame Grès leaves the Kunstgewerbemuseum on the 11th.
GemäldegalerieOpens 16 October
Around 80 portraits across five centuries, Botticelli to Lempicka: rulers in full state, intimate scenes of friendship and proud self-portraits, which is the selfie back when it took weeks.
Berlinische GalerieOpens 9 October
Lovis Corinth's rise in Berlin after 1900: the expressive painting, the painting school he ran for women, his work for the theatre and his domestic circle.
Gropius BauOpens 9 October
Schlingensief's first comprehensive Berlin exhibition in more than a decade: political actions, radical stage productions and performance art, with doubt and failure as the through-line.
Deutsches Historisches MuseumOpens 16 October
A side-by-side look at colonial and Nazi violence in the 20th century, from racism to forced labour and concentration camps, setting out where the two regimes resemble each other and where they differ.
KW Institute for Contemporary ArtOpens 17 October
The first Berlin survey of Susan Hiller, a pioneer of conceptual and video art, built around hypnotic audiovisual installations on fantasy, fear and the unconscious. KW shows two further solo exhibitions alongside it.
KunstgewerbemuseumCloses 11 October
Around 150 pieces on the couturier Madame Grès, built around the museum's own 25 Grès garments, one of the largest holdings outside Paris, with sculpture and student designs alongside.
Alte NationalgalerieOpens 22 October
Gursky, Sarah Lucas, Miró and Warhol hang among the Menzels and Friedrichs on all three floors for the museum's 150th anniversary, the collection's 20th- and 21st-century holdings set against the 19th century they came out of.
Neue NationalgalerieUntil 7 March 2027
Him, Cattelan's small kneeling figure with Hitler's face, and Novecento, a stuffed horse hung from the ceiling, with new commissions under Mies van der Rohe's glass roof. His first major solo show in Germany, for the Preis der Nationalgalerie.
C/O BerlinUntil 3 February 2027
One kitchen table under one hanging lamp: the set of Weems's 1990 Kitchen Table Series starts a four-decade retrospective of more than 100 photographs and videos, through Family Pictures and Stories to her new Preach series.
Hamburger BahnhofUntil 20 June 2027
A school piano wrecked by the 2011 tsunami stands in a pool of water, its keys pressed by live earthquake data. In the taz, Julian Weber called the staging Zen-like, but numbing in its sheer technology.
Fotografiska Berlin
Miji Ih's largest solo show: photography, archive material, sound and video on "comfort women" and the lives of women around US military bases in Japan, South Korea and Germany.
Fotografiska Berlin
Roger Ballen's path from black-and-white photography to mixed media and Art Brut, with Polaroids, etchings, drawings and a new Drawing Man installation.
Brücke-Museum
Germany's first comprehensive survey of Swedish modernism: Sigrid Hjertén, Isaac Grünewald, Nils Dardel and the Göteborg Colourists, on loan from Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Hamburger Bahnhof
Sophie Calle combines works made in Berlin with others that reference the museum's history as a railway station.
Fotografiska Berlin
Emerging artist Carola Lampe mixes street photography, staged scenes and AI-generated images until you can't tell photographed reality from machine fiction.
Käthe Kollwitz Museum Berlin
About 40 paintings and drawings by Ida Gerhardi (1862–1927), mostly from her Paris years around 1905: expressive dance-hall scenes and self-portraits. Her first Berlin show in 25 years.
Fotografiska Berlin
Lee Shulman turns forgotten amateur slides from his archive of around a million into an immersive domestic landscape of anonymous family life.
Humboldt Forum
Video installation on endangered languages and family, with community members documenting their languages, made with the Endangered Languages Archive.
Museum für Fotografie
Helmut Newton Foundation group show on space as stage: a dozen artists' rooms, sets and deserted interiors beside Newton's hotel-suite fashion shoots and murals.
Alte Nationalgalerie
The painter, writer and traveller whose 1887 painting Mors Imperator, rejected by the Berlin Academy of Arts, made her famous overnight.
Museum für Fotografie
A unique album Newton assembled in 1999 for collector Gert Elfering, shown in Berlin for the first time: hand-annotated small prints, Polaroids and outtakes.
DDR Museum
What became of the GDR's flags, emblems and medals after 1990: dumped in containers, sold at flea markets, and still shaping how Germany remembers.
Jewish Museum BerlinFree
For the building's 25th anniversary, drawings and models trace how Libeskind's 1989 competition design became one of the most influential museum buildings. Free.
Humboldt Forum
Three large interventions by Māori artist George Nuku in two rooms of the Oceania galleries, made in polystyrene and Plexiglas during his Collaborative Museum fellowships.
Berlinische Galerie
A video programme by Creamcake exploring how the real and the invented bleed into each other, with work from four artists on power, identity and institutional critique.
Gropius Bau
The largest institutional solo show yet of East German artist Gabriele Stötzer: about 150 works in painting, photography, textile, Super 8 film and performance on justice, gender and resistance.
Humboldt Forum
Marks 100 years of the Society for East Asian Art with museum holdings and loans, including an 18th-century Japanese Buddhist painting.
Deutsches TechnikmuseumFree
Free, hands-on space by the MobilitätDigital initiative in Hall 6 of the Ladestraße: VR accident replays, AI avatars and an image-recognition challenge on data and AI in mobility.
Neues Museum
In the Mythological Hall, a centenary show on the Egyptian Dictionary, begun in this building in 1897 from over a million hand-copied index cards.
Hamburger Bahnhof
Works by Shilpa Gupta on language, borders and power, in direct dialogue with Joseph Beuys and the Marx Collection.
Neue Nationalgalerie
Around 35 collection works by Dix, Höch and others on Berlin between war, excess, poverty and emancipation in the 1910s and 1920s.
Bode-Museum
Jérémie Queyras's official portrait of Angela Merkel, Chancellor for 16 years, on public display for the first time before it joins the Chancellery's gallery.
Jewish Museum Berlin
Twelve contemporary art projects, by Yael Bartana, William Forsythe, Alexander Kluge and others, imagine paths to a different present. Old Building, level 1.
Altes Museum
The upper-floor show revisits the museum's 1830 beginnings, reuniting antiquities from its first display around a large model of Schinkel's original building.
Neues Museum
The history of the zodiac from Babylonia to Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, from star tablets to celestial ceilings.
![KOO JEONG A, Land of Ouss [Kangse], 2025–2026, installation view](https://stjzqvtsmrdsnxjcolnn.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/martin-and-lewis/registry/exhibitions/bb7bdf792abf4ca196932a48ad1f5c09-w256.webp)
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
KOO JEONG A's first major solo show in Germany: multisensory environments of light, scent, sound and temperature, reconfigured for KW's architecture.
Gemäldegalerie
A cabinet show marking the 300th birthday of Chodowiecki, star of late-18th-century Berlin, with 20+ of his key works on the Enlightenment's social questions.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
The first Berlin survey of Susan Hiller, a pioneer of conceptual and video art, with hypnotic audiovisual installations probing fantasy, fear and the unconscious.
Hamburger Bahnhof
Lina Lapelytė turns the Historic Hall into a polyphonic stage for a participatory choreography.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Rafik Greiss's first institutional solo show premieres a new film essay drifting through Cairo, Alexandria and the Western Desert on time, memory and history.
Fotografiska Berlin
Lauren Greenfield's social experiment on growing up in the digital age: teenagers, selfies and the pressures of social media.
Gropius Bau
Schlingensief's first comprehensive Berlin exhibition in over a decade, from political actions to radical stage productions and performance art, focused on questioning, doubt and failure.
Gropius Bau
Around 130 works on labour migration, exile, housing, racism and solidarity in Kreuzberg since the 'guest worker' era, from rarely shown historical pieces to new commissions.
Kunstgewerbemuseum
22 textile works by Sofie Dawo (1926–2010), who reworked fabric by disrupting and damaging it, creating objects that sit between art and craft.
Deutsches Historisches Museum
Eight centuries of how Germans defined and politicised 'nature', from medieval faith through Nazi ideas of natural law to 20th-century environmental and anti-nuclear movements.
Alte Nationalgalerie
The National Museum in Warsaw opens a new guest series with “Inventing Myths”, showing Polish masters such as Malczewski and Matejko on the first floor.
C/O Berlin
After Nature Prize 26: photographs, films and sculptural assemblages from Akrotiri, Cyprus, where rich ecosystems meet military infrastructure.
C/O Berlin
After Nature Prize 26: Berlin artist Susanne Kriemann traces the atomic age's remnants at former uranium mines, using autoradiography in her Pechblende (Fever) series.
Berlinische Galerie
Major show on Lovis Corinth's rise in Berlin after 1900: his expressive painting, his women's painting school, his theatre work and his domestic circle.
Kulturforum
More than 100 Flemish drawings from 1570 to 1650 by 28 artists, many shown for the first time in fifty years.
Topography of TerrorFree
Around 300 objects in three parts – propaganda, everyday clues and pieced-together knowledge – ask what ordinary Germans knew about the Holocaust.
Berlinische Galerie
Drawings, photographs, films and models on the GDR architect behind Karl-Marx-Allee's Kino International, with new works by three contemporary artists.
C/O Berlin
Four-decade retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems: over 100 photographs and videos, from the Kitchen Table Series and Family Pictures and Stories to her new Preach series.
Fotografiska Berlin
Key series from 1959 to 1972 by the late Berlin photojournalist, from Alexanderplatz and FDJ events to Vietnam and Cuba.
Fotografiska Berlin
Computer-generated forms drift and collide on the museum's LED façade. Best seen after dark from the street opposite the entrance.
Humboldt Forum
Mirae kh Rhee asks how objects reached their places in collections and who collects and why, in a cabinet-of-curiosities project from a transnational feminist, decolonial view.
Bröhan-Museum
Posters, books, graphic works and paper installations from more than 25 years of practice by graphic designer Jumping He. Free public tours on Sundays at 15:00.
Alte Nationalgalerie
For the 150th anniversary, 20th- and 21st-century works from the Nationalgalerie collection are set beside 19th-century art on all three floors.
Kunstgewerbemuseum
Berlin University of the Arts students imagine the tableware of 2101, shown alongside historical porcelain and faience from the museum's collection.
Neue Nationalgalerie
Cattelan's first major solo show in Germany, for the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie: Him, Novecento and new commissions in Mies's glass hall.
Humboldt Forum
A look at the hidden work of museum conservators, through restored objects such as Canadian crest poles, a Qing lacquer cabinet and a Mongolian shrine.
Gemäldegalerie
Around 80 portraits spanning five centuries, from rulers in full glory to intimate scenes of friendship and proud self-portraits, Botticelli to Lempicka.
Neues Museum
Artist Michael Müller reworks the myth of the twins Castor and Polydeuces in the staircase hall, a meditation on time and mortality.
![Exhibition view of [ materialistin ]. Matter of Care, Care of Matter](https://stjzqvtsmrdsnxjcolnn.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/martin-and-lewis/registry/exhibitions/8f3786a0e2544f5db49660314301dd9e-w256.webp)
Hamburger Bahnhof
Group exhibition by the artists' collective [ materialistin ], highlighting new forms of collective practice and solidarity.
Bröhan-Museum
Berlin's first monographic show on Cesar Klein, 150 years after his birth: Neue Secession co-founder, painter, and a leading stage and interior designer of the 1920s.
Humboldt Forum
Marks 120 years of the East Asian Art Collection with the fisherman motif in Chinese painting, a symbol of escape from a turbulent world.
Humboldt Forum
Netta Weiser's first sound exhibition in Berlin, in the Listening Space: 1930s wax cylinder recordings from Siwa, Egypt, by Brigitte Schiffer, reworked through a queer-diasporic lens.
Neue Nationalgalerie
The Nationalgalerie's post-war collection from East and West, 1945–2000, including Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV.
Berlinische Galerie
The GASAG Art Prize winner's first institutional solo show in Berlin: paintings, sculptures and installations built from sand and traces of time.
Deutsches Historisches Museum
A comparative exhibition on colonial and Nazi violence in the 20th century: racism, forced labour and concentration camps, and how the two regimes resemble and differ.
Neue Nationalgalerie
A room devoted to Christoph Schlingensief, centred on Deutschland versenken (1999), his action of 'sinking Germany' in New York.
Humboldt Forum
Over 10,000 Tanzanian objects from the Ethnologisches Museum shown alongside Tanzanian curators' and artists' perspectives on German and British colonial rule.
Hamburger Bahnhof
The first major European retrospective of Ryuichi Sakamoto: seven works in five large-scale installations, opening during Berlin Art Week.
Hamburger Bahnhof
Group show in the Rieckhallen with Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Henrik Håkansson and Tomás Saraceno, on view until further notice.
Deutsches Technikmuseum
An exhibition by children for children: models built by 60 young 'future curators' from four Berlin schools imagine a liveable city of tomorrow, with hands-on stations in the Ladestraße.
Museum für Naturkunde
Around 11,500 historic mounted birds, moved out of the Historic Bird Hall during its restoration, tell stories of bird diversity, war, research and conservation.
Humboldt Forum
Feminist voices on war and gardens: art, photography and interviews on women's solidarity across borders and the healing power of community gardens.
Humboldt Forum
Young Visions from Neukölln: eleven young people on today's injustices and a fairer future. Visitors can take a seat on the throne. In BERLIN GLOBAL.
Neues Museum
Migration-period gold and garnet jewellery from the Diergardt collection, on loan from Cologne, led by a noblewoman's diadem from Crimea.
Humboldt ForumFree
Free show in the Humboldt Lab pairing Berlin University Alliance water research with artistic takes on water and the climate crisis.
Kunstgewerbemuseum
Some 100 pewter works at Schloss Köpenick trace the material from sacred objects to everyday items, including furniture by cabinetmaker Johann Daniel Sommer combining tortoiseshell, horn and pewter.
Deutsches Historisches Museum
Around 200 objects from the DHM's million-piece collection, some never shown before, exploring provenance, 150 years of collecting and how places have shaped history.
Museum für Naturkunde
Original fossils from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, from early Plateosaurus to the superbly preserved T. rex Tristan Otto, with an Allosaurus skull.
Museum für Fotografie
An immersive four-screen film on Helmut Newton with unseen footage and interviews, plus a wall of nearly 100 exhibition posters, before a new permanent display in 2027.
KulturforumFree
Free Kunstbibliothek presentation on the artistic community around Matthäikirchplatz a century ago, whose cultural life ended in 1933.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
