October 2026
October at a glance: 9 exhibitions opening, 9 closing, and 49 more on view across the city.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gemäldegalerie
Around 80 portraits spanning five centuries, from rulers in full glory to intimate scenes of friendship and proud self-portraits, Botticelli to Lempicka.
![KOO JEONG A, Land of Ouss [Kangse], 2025–2026, installation view](https://stjzqvtsmrdsnxjcolnn.supabase.co/storage/v1/render/image/public/martin-and-lewis/registry/exhibitions/bb7bdf792abf4ca196932a48ad1f5c09.webp?width=96&quality=75)
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.

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.

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.

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.

Museum für Fotografie
Some 300 photographs from the Bauhaus-Archiv celebrate the women photographers of the Bauhaus and Chicago's New Bauhaus, from portraits to abstract experiments.

Bode-Museum
Sculptures from the collection shown beside historical photographic reproductions from the museum's archive, asking how photographs shape the way we see and remember 3D art.

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.

Neue Nationalgalerie
Glenn Ligon's 2012 neon Double America, the word AMERICA doubled by a reversed shadow, questioning a single American narrative.

Kunstgewerbemuseum
Around 150 pieces on haute-couture pioneer Madame Grès, including the museum's 25 Grès garments, one of the largest holdings outside Paris, shown with sculpture and student designs.

Bröhan-Museum
Artist and designer Linde Burkhardt (b. 1937): paintings, carpets, ceramics and her metal-and-ceramic objects for Alessi. Most works then pass to the museum as a gift.

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.

Brücke-Museum
Beloved and rarely shown Brücke works celebrating nature, from the collection, with new responses by Lizza May David, Alina Schmuch and atelier le balto.

Berlinische Galerie
Film trilogy in the IBB Video Space on the water, desert and silicon behind chips and AI, from drought-hit Hsinchu, Taiwan, to Arizona's data-centre desert.

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.

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.

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.

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
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.

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.

Jewish Museum Berlin · Free
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.

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.

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.

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.

Deutsches Technikmuseum · Free
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.

Fotografiska Berlin
Computer-generated forms drift and collide on the museum's LED façade. Best seen after dark from the street opposite the entrance.

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.

Neues Museum
The history of the zodiac from Babylonia to Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, from star tablets to celestial ceilings.

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.

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.

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.

Hamburger Bahnhof
Lina Lapelytė turns the Historic Hall into a polyphonic stage for a participatory choreography.

Fotografiska Berlin
Lauren Greenfield's social experiment on growing up in the digital age: teenagers, selfies and the pressures of social media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Topography of Terror · Free
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.

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.

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/render/image/public/martin-and-lewis/registry/exhibitions/8f3786a0e2544f5db49660314301dd9e.webp?width=96&quality=75)
Hamburger Bahnhof
Group exhibition by the artists' collective [ materialistin ], highlighting new forms of collective practice and solidarity.

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.

Neue Nationalgalerie
A room devoted to Christoph Schlingensief, centred on Deutschland versenken (1999), his action of 'sinking Germany' in New York.

Bröhan-Museum
Weimar-era cake plates bright with stencilled spray decoration show how Art Deco, Bauhaus and Constructivism found their way onto the German coffee table.

Hamburger Bahnhof
The first major European retrospective of Ryuichi Sakamoto: seven works in five large-scale installations, opening during Berlin Art Week.

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
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.

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.

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 Forum · Free
Free show in the Humboldt Lab pairing Berlin University Alliance water research with artistic takes on water and the climate crisis.

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 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.

Neue Nationalgalerie
Non-representational art made under National Socialism by Willi Baumeister, Jeanne Mammen, Alexej von Jawlensky and others.

Berlinische Galerie
About 160 photographs of the queer, club and art scenes of 1970s–80s West Berlin and New York, from Klaus Nomi to Divine, by the little-known Rolf von Bergmann.

Alte Nationalgalerie
Around 150 works for Arnold Böcklin's 200th birthday, bringing together several versions of The Isle of the Dead. With Kunstmuseum Basel.

Berlinische Galerie
First major German exhibition of the Norwegian artist: some 40 paintings and prints, 1930–1970, from satirical drawings to metal-leaf abstract landscapes.

Gemäldegalerie
For Gainsborough's 300th birthday, some 50 works from Berlin's British collection and international loans, focused on the poetic bond between portrait and nature.

Gemäldegalerie
Contemporary photography shown alongside the Old Master paintings of the Gemäldegalerie.

Deutsches Historisches Museum
Portraits of princes, statesmen and stateswomen and figures from industry, science, sport and culture, in painting, sculpture, photography and digital media (working title).
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.