Gallery Weekend Berlin Expands With a New Section for Younger Galleries
Gallery Weekend Berlin will expand from 50 to 57 participants for its 1-3 May edition, adding a new section called Perspectives for younger galleries taking part in the event for the first time. The move is intended to refresh a format that has become one of Berlin’s most important commercial art weekends, while also responding to criticism that the roster has remained too consistent.
The event began in 2005 with 21 dealers, when Berlin was still drawing artists with the promise of low costs and a dense creative scene but had relatively few local buyers. It has since become, for many participants, their strongest sales week outside an art fair. Yet its success has also made its structure more visible. Gallery Weekend Berlin is not open to applications; instead, galleries are invited by a selection committee. Antonia Ruder, the event’s director, says the process is shaped by practical constraints as much as by curatorial judgment. “Space is a key issue,” she says. “We have to ensure that someone could feasibly visit all the galleries over a weekend, and ensure a certain quality of exhibition.”
Perspectives is meant to widen access without abandoning that framework. The galleries in the new section will pay 50% of the usual €9,000 participation fee, with the discount subsidized by the Berlin Senate. Among the participants are Anton Janizewski, which is showing sculptures by Jiyoon Chung cast from bottles of celebrity-endorsed tequila brands, and Persons Projects, which is presenting a duo exhibition of abstract paintings and photography by Karl Benjamin and Grey Crawford.
For Markus Summerer, co-founder of Mountains, the change is overdue. His gallery, founded in 2019, is showing sculptures and wall-based works by South Korean artist Shinoh Nam, priced from €2,000 to €16,000. Summerer says the initiative is “a long overdue and welcome step in the right direction,” though he would like to see the idea of rotation applied more broadly, including to the main section.
The timing is significant. Berlin’s art scene is no longer buoyed by the same conditions that once made it a magnet for artists and dealers. Funding cuts have tightened the cultural landscape, wealth patterns have shifted, and the city’s identity as a place of easy artistic possibility has become harder to sustain. In that context, Perspectives looks less like a simple programming update than a measured attempt to keep one of Berlin’s signature art events aligned with a changing city.
