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Berlin’s international reputation as a liberal, relaxed city that nurtures artists’ freedom to express whatever they want is under threat. The art scene here has been roiled by protests, cancellations and boycotts after the Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel, and many artists now say that a climate of fear has replaced the city’s anything-goes vibe.
But at the 20th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, the annual showcase for the city’s contemporary art dealerships that concluded Sunday, it was business as usual, with no sign of the clashes that have been shaking the cultural sector.
Those conflicts — between institutions funded by the German government, which has staunchly supported Israel, and artists wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians — were a frequent topic of conversation at the event’s 1,000-guest dinner in the spectacular Neue Nationalgalerie on Saturday. Yet few organizers or participants wanted to discuss the situation in interviews.
“We need to react with intelligence, not emotion,” said Esther Schipper, one of the three dealers who founded Gallery Weekend 20 years ago. Otherwise, like other participating dealers, she declined to comment on the discord in Berlin’s art world.
In 2005, Berlin was the first city to offer a formal program of coordinated gallery shows as an alternative to a commercial art fair. Initially, it featured 21 dealers; this year, there were 55. The idea has caught on and there are now more than 20 gallery weekends scattered across the globe, from Los Angeles to Dublin to Beijing.
Unlike competing art world hubs, such as New York, London and Paris, Berlin doesn’t have any international auction houses or fairs, or a large client base of super-wealthy residents. But according to the city’s Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, it does have an estimated 20,000 professional artists living here. Their creative energy, and that of exhibiting foreign artists, has been a draw for visiting collectors.
“Unlike New York, there’s zero pressure to buy, and you can put together a serious collection for not a lot of money,” the Vancouver-based collector Marshall Webb said of Gallery Weekend. He added that, in his view, the Berlin event remained the pick of the international offerings in this format.
North American accents weren’t heard as often in the participating galleries as in recent years. Dealers said that having the recent preview of the Venice Biennale among this year’s competing attractions had reduced the number of international visitors.
“Wars don’t help,” said Lena Zimmermann, a partner at Galerie Buchholz, which had plenty of foot traffic, albeit mostly German-speaking, on Saturday at an exhibition of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans, one of Berlin’s local superstar artists.
The show featured more than 70 images, mostly new, including landscape and still-life studies Tillmans made on recent visits to Silicon Valley and Mongolia. Echoing the current experience of many art dealers, Zimmerman said that business for Galerie Buchholz had been “a bit slower since Covid,” but the gallery did sell two large versions of Tillmans’s “San Francisco Still Life,” priced at about $115,000, to American and European collectors, she said.
There were also early sales at a conceptual group show of works by five young Asian women artists at Sprüth Magers. Curated by the gallery’s senior director Shi-Ne Oh, this included a slowly self-destructing concrete wall sculpture by Gala Porras-Kim and an aquarium filled with concrete cactus sculptures by Zhang Ruyi.
“Everyone says it’s a museum show, but people are buying,” Shi-Ne said. About 40 percent of the works sold during Gallery Weekend for prices between 15,000 euros and €150,000, or around $16,000 to $160,000, according to the gallery.
For some international artists who have made their homes in Berlin, the upheavals of the last six months have been difficult to understand. Debates around whether artists should be free to align themselves with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which Germany’s Parliament has officially designated as antisemitic, had been simmering for years. But since Oct. 7, some artists have said that they lost opportunities at state-funded institutions after expressing simple support for the Palestinian cause.
“I’m from the U.K. It’s been an adjustment for me to realize the German position,” said the artist Angharad Williams, who has been living in Berlin since 2020.
“I’m worried. Many friends have had events canceled. It’s closing down conversations that are important. It feels extremely regressive,” Williams said. “Many artists have told me they’re planning on leaving. Berlin will suffer, and is already,” she added. “I’m scared of expressing my opinions.”
For Gallery Weekend, the up-and-coming dealership Schiefe Zähne (“Crooked Teeth”) was showing new works by Williams in a range of media inspired by what she sees on the streets of today’s Berlin. Large spray-painted panels that memorialize the city’s once-ubiquitous graffiti culture, now threatened by gentrification, were priced around $16,000 each.
Antonia Ruder, Gallery Weekend Berlin’s new director, declined to comment in an interview on the issues fracturing the city’s creative landscape. However, when asked if Berlin’s state government, which is the event’s largest sponsor, had censored any elements of this year’s event, Ruder said: “Totally not. It was never ever a point of discussion.”
Ruder, a former head of communications at Berlin’s Schaubühne theater, said she had no plans to change or expand the 20-year-old event. “The format is still doing very well,” Ruder said. “The art world is changing rapidly,” but Berlin’s gallery scene is “very strong,” she added.
The huge number of artists living in the city is what gives Berlin its strength as an art hub. But with rents soaring as the city becomes ever more gentrified, can Berlin continue to be a magnet for artistic talent if artists don’t feel free to say what they want to say?
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