Berlin Art Week 2026: 100 Venues in 3 Days + Gallery Night

An entire city becomes an exhibition space for 5 days

Founded in 2012 as an alternative to the defunct art forum berlin, Berlin Art Week has become, according to the contemporary art network e-flux, « one of the first, largest and most ambitious art weeks in Europe ». The 2026 edition brings together, per the official statement of the organiser Kulturprojekte Berlin, more than 120 institutions: museums, private collections, galleries, project spaces and the Positions fair. The full programme, published on 4 August 2026 on berlinartweek.de, lists more than 300 events, including over 100 openings and 31 « Featured » projects selected from more than 200 applications.

The week follows a set rhythm: Wednesday 9 September, openings at the major institutions; Thursday 10, the Positions fair and Gallery Night; Friday 11, Featured Night for the independent scene; Saturday 12, Open Houses at the private collections; Sunday 13, artist talks and « Tag im Grünen » at the Kulturforum. New for 2026: the Berlin Art Week Garten, a free central hub (10am–10pm) with bookable talks, workshops and tours, moves to the Kulturforum, hosted by the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Gemäldegalerie, according to Kulturprojekte Berlin‘s press release and the official visitBerlin page. In 2025 the garden stood at the Hamburger Bahnhof, so older guides are best ignored.

Highlights

• A week that is largely free: openings, Gallery Night, the Garten and the Open Houses need no ticket
• Two complementary « gallery miles »: Auguststraße in Mitte and Potsdamer Straße
• The Garten at the Kulturforum, a central info point open from 10am to 10pm

54 galleries, one evening, free entry

Gallery Night is organised by Gallery Weekend Berlin in collaboration with Berlin Art Week. A single evening — Thursday 10 September 2026, from 6pm to 10pm — during which 54 galleries across the city open their new shows at the same time, free of charge, per the official announcement from Gallery Weekend Berlin. This year’s line-up: Robert Rauschenberg at BASTIAN, Walter Dahn and Salvo at Sprüth Magers, Martin Margiela at Konrad Fischer, Ersan Mondtag at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, a collective « Exquisite corpse » at Pace, and David Claerbout at Esther Schipper.

The next day, the galleries stay open from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 September, 12pm to 6pm. The map of venues is available on gallery-weekend-berlin.de/map. Vernissage etiquette stays relaxed: arrive around 7pm–8pm rather than at opening time, leave the camera in your pocket in the rooms where it’s banned, and don’t force meetings with the artists, as the Berlin Tourism guide reminds us.

Highlights

• Free entry to all 54 galleries, no ticket required
• One-off shows designed for this very evening
• Whole neighbourhoods to walk, gallery after gallery

13th edition, 80+ galleries from 20 countries, Turkey in focus

Positions is the week’s only official fair, a partner of Berlin Art Week since 2014. The 13th edition runs from 10 to 13 September 2026 in hangars 5 and 6 of the former Tempelhof airport (Tempelhofer Damm 45), with « over 90 selected galleries from around 20 countries », per the official Berlin Art Week website, and a 2026 focus on Turkish galleries. The setting alone is worth the trip: 10,000 m² under 16-metre ceilings inside Europe’s largest architectural monument, as THF Berlin reminds us.

Tickets are sold on tickets.positions.de: €25 full price, €15 reduced, free for under-18s, per rausgegangen.de. The Thursday 10 September vernissage (6pm–9pm) costs €20. Allow half a day: recent editions draw 30,000+ visitors, and the booths deserve time.

Highlights

• A concentrated snapshot of the international contemporary art market
• The unique setting of the Tempelhof hangars, closed in 2008 and now a city park
• The « Fashion » section of recent editions, praised by the specialist press

« NIGHT » at the Neue Nationalgalerie, « seeing sound, hearing time » at the Hamburger Bahnhof

The 2026 Nationalgalerie Prize goes to Maurizio Cattelan, and the Neue Nationalgalerie gives him his first major solo show in Germany: « Maurizio Cattelan. NIGHT », from 10 September 2026 to 7 March 2027, per smb.museum. Expect historic works such as Him (2001) or Novecento (1997), plus a site-specific piece made for Mies van der Rohe’s building. Exhibition ticket: €16, €8 reduced; full museum ticket: €20.

Same day, almost same hour: the Hamburger Bahnhof opens the first major European retrospective of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023), « seeing sound, hearing time », as part of the museum’s 30th anniversary. The opening on Thursday 10 September, 7pm to 10pm, is free; the show runs until 23 May 2027 across some 1,500 m² of the Rieckhallen, featuring IS YOUR TIME, the tsunami piano, per smb.museum. Hamburger Bahnhof day ticket: €16, free for under-18s.

Also worth noting: the « Perform! » festival presents Trisha Brown’s « Walking on the Wall » daily at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the Berliner Ensemble co-produces « Alternde Meister » with the Gemäldegalerie, a performance by Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman (€20 for the premiere, €14 after, or free with a museum ticket), per visitBerlin. The performance includes naked performers — a factual note from the museum worth knowing before you book.

Highlights

• Cattelan’s first major retrospective in Germany, on until March 2027
• Sakamoto’s free opening on 10 September, 7pm to 10pm
• The Museum Pass Berlin at €32, worth it from three paid museums

One district per day, aligned with the official programme

The brief’s figure is actually conservative: Berlin Art Week 2026 brings together more than 120 institutions, per Kulturprojekte Berlin‘s 14 July 2026 statement. To see it all without burning out, festival director Mona Stehle recommends in The Berliner to « just pick a part of the city and dive in » — one district per day. The Berlin Walk guide sums up the method: « Berlin Art Week rewards attention, not distance ». Here are three sample days.

Day 1 (Wednesday 9 Sept): Mitte and the openings

• Official opening of the week at the n.b.k., Chausseestraße 128–129, from 6pm
• Free Open House at the KW Institute (Auguststraße 69), 4pm–9pm, on the last weekend of the Kyiv Biennial
• A stroll down the Auguststraße gallery mile: EIGEN+ART, Neugerriemschneider and their neighbourhood openings

Day 2 (Thursday 10 Sept): Tempelhof, Neukölln, Gallery Night

• Positions at Tempelhof in the morning (€25), lunch in Neukölln (a döner averages €8, per Finepassport)
• A walk across Tempelhofer Feld, the vast park of the former airport
• Gallery Night from 6pm to 10pm: 3 to 4 galleries within a 15-minute walk, then dinner at the Markthalle Neun

Day 3 (Friday 11 Sept): Kulturforum and Potsdamer Straße

• Cattelan’s « NIGHT » at the Neue Nationalgalerie (€16) in the morning
• The Garten at the Kulturforum (free, 10am–10pm) to get your bearings, then the Gemäldegalerie
• Potsdamer Straße: around thirty galleries, 6 to 8 addresses in under an hour (Esther Schipper, Sprüth Magers, Max Hetzler, Buchholz)

Bonus on Saturday: the Open Houses open the private collections without registration (Fluentum, Haubrok Foundation), and the König Galerie hosts shows in the brutalist St. Agnes church in Kreuzberg, the district our street art and nightlife guide explores in depth. The Boros collection, in its bunker on Reinhardtstraße, requires a reservation on boros-collection.com — €20, booked months ahead for festival week.

Budget and transport

On entries, the range goes from €0 (openings, Gallery Night, the Garten, the Open Houses) to around €77 for the full version: Museum Pass €32 + Positions €25 + Boros €20, per the official rates on smb.museum and boros-collection.com. Transport costs €11.20 for a 24-hour ticket in zones AB, per berlin.de — worth it from three trips. From the UK, a direct flight from London takes around 1h45: Ryanair from Stansted from about £80 return in September, easyJet from Luton or Gatwick, British Airways from Heathrow or City. Prefer the rails? The European Sleeper night train, relaunched in March 2026, pairs with the Eurostar: it calls at Brussels-Midi at 21:45 and reaches Berlin Hauptbahnhof at 09:59, from around €80 in a shared compartment — detailed in our night train guide. And before you book, check the latest entry rules on GOV.UK.