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Five things to see at Berlin Art Week 2021

The city-wide show brings together the finest in contemporary art for its big birthday bash from September 15-19. To help you celebrate, we bring you our top five tips.

Berlin Art Week is turning 10. The city-wide show brings together the finest in contemporary art for its big birthday bash from September 15-19. To help you celebrate, we bring you our top five tips.

Ferdinand Hodler and Modernist Berlin

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Merging realism with post-impressionism, Ferdinand Hodler “created the soul by painting the body”. Photo: © Kunstmuseum Bern

Merging realism with post-impressionism, Ferdinand Hodler “created the soul by painting the body”. What is less known is the importance Berlin played in the Swiss artist’s ascendency. At the same time, one of Berlin’s favourite artists, Alicja Kwade, opens her new show In Absence on September 19 in the exhibition hall, with works that seek to distil the presence of a person through space and chemical elements.

Sep 9 – Jan 17 Berlinische Galerie, Kreuzberg

HR Giger & Mire Lee

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Prepare to see the dome of the Schinkel Pavillon morph into an atmospheric womb-like space. Photo: Schinkel Pavillon Mire Lee Carriers 2020. © the artist and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Photo: Yonje Kim and HR Giger, Atomkinder, 1968 © HR Giger Museum

Paring the Alien creator HR Giger’s cold biomechanoid airbrushed images with the synthetic/organic sculptural appendages of Mire Lee looks set to be a fascinating match-up. Prepare to see the dome of the Pavillon morph into an atmospheric womb-like space for an unsettling and outlandish take on eroticism, birth and death.

Sep 17 – Jan 2 Schinkel Pavillon, Mitte

The New Infinity

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The Zeiss-Großplanetarium becomes a gallery of the future as well as an immersive experiential space of the present. Photo: Berliner Festspiele

Where once planetariums were for scientists and stoned stargazers, they’ve been reimagined as immersive contemporary art showcases in recent years. Look out for the hyperreal abstract worlds of ‘Non-face’, the full-dome premiere of Lucas Gutierrez & Robert Lippok, and the video installation The Way Earthly Things Are Going by Emeka Ogboh.

Sep 17-19 Zeiss-Großplanetarium, Prenzlauer Berg

Impressionism in Russia: Dawn of the Avant-Garde

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The revolutionary time when French impressionism changed Russian art forever is the focus of the Barberini’s latest exhibition. Photo: Abram Arkhipov, The Visit, 1914, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Vasily Kandinsky was so unsettled by Monet’s ‘Haystacks’, with their bright colours and lack of representation, that he renounced motif in his work and pioneered abstract art. That revolutionary time, when French impressionism changed Russian art forever, is the focus of the Barberini’s latest exhibition, which also features works by Kazimir Malevich.

Through Jan 9 Barberini Museum, Potsdam

art (not art), the Berlin Art Week Directors’ Lounge

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Pop into Schokoladen for what promises to be an intriguing and chaotic evening of experimental live music, DJs, performances and video art – all with no admission fee. Photo: André Werner

Pop into Schokoladen for what promises to be an intriguing and chaotic evening of experimental live music, DJs, performances and video art – all with no admission fee. Old-school punk outfit Sheef kick off proceedings, followed by ‘Light Bulb Music’, an audio-visual performance that uses light to create pulsating electro-acoustic soundscapes. After that come the mesmerising loops of Erdal Inci, before the night gives way to a DJ set by Steve Morell, the founder of German-British label Pale Music.

Sep 17, 19-24 Schokoladen, Mitte


Want more art? Don’t miss the must-see art exhibitions this September