The HEIST Guide to Gallery Weekend 2026
HEIST picks the best of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026: from Potsdamer Strasse to Kreuzberg and beyond, plus four Sellerie Weekend highlights for Sunday.
Gallery Weekend Berlin — May 1 to 3 — is the biggest art event on the city's calendar, with almost every venue bringing out its heaviest hitters for three days of openings. It can be overwhelming. So we've put together two routes: one for Friday, running north to south down Potsdamer Strasse and into Schöneberg; one for Saturday, going up through Kreuzberg and Mitte to Friedrichshain (take a bike). Follow either, and you'll see some of the very best shows opening in Berlin this weekend. For Sunday, we've picked four highlights from Sellerie Weekend, the non-commercial programme of project spaces running across the city.
This year's shows also happen to open on International Workers Day — and the coincidence feels like an invitation to think about the relationship between politics and art. The mixture of silence and complicity that has been overwhelming Berlin's art world was perhaps best exemplified by the Nan Goldin retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2024. Since then, Berlin's bigger institutions have tended to sand down the political edges of the artists they show, and the question has hung in the air: can the smaller galleries step up and show something more urgent?
Among this year's Gallery Weekend programme, there are some who seem to rise to that challenge, whether explicitly political or formally innovative, strong options are showing on every day.
Nobody can see everything on offer, but follow this guide, and you'll get through plenty.
