On the occasion of the Gallery weekend, Berlin experiences one of its most flourishing times of the year for art shows, openings, performances and talks around the city. This article provides an overview of five exhibitions yet to be visited, opened for the 2025 edition of the spring program.
Pol Taburet, “The Burden of Papa Tonnerre”, installation view at Schinkel Pavillon, ph. Enrico Boschi per Juliet
Schinkel Pavillon is now hosting a solo show by Pol Taburet (1997, France) open until 13 July 2025. Located in the centre of Berlin, not far from Museen Insel, Schinkel Pavillon is an institution promoting contemporary art with exhibitions of young artists and retrospectives, hosting performances, talks and debates. Pol Taburet is a French painter, sculptor and visual artist with Caribbean origins who lives and works in Paris. The first solo exhibition in Germany by Tabouret, entitled “The Burden of Papa Tonnerre” gathers a selection of paintings, sculptures and lithographs. The title of the show refers to the character of Papa Tonnerre “as a figure born mute, punished with the knowledge of the secrets and guilt of others” representing throughout the canvases “the struggle for his voice in dialogue with occult forces”. The ground floor of the museum features an installation with several judging heads, bronze sculptures that were painted in a clayish pigment, surrounded by large format canvases mostly in dark colours often pierced with white-coloured elements that create a poetic and suspended atmosphere in the room. On the same floor, a small room is dedicated to an uncanny and impressive series of lithographs in black and white. Going up the stairs you can find other paintings, also of smaller format, and a sculptural composition in the middle of the room. Tabouret’s painting technique involves different kinds of pigments and the use of air brushes, giving birth to unique images that play with the art tradition and with his take on popular culture, music and television, collaging and recomposing history throughout his biographical experience.
Anne Imhof, “Romeo”, 2025, oil on canvas, 280 x 374 cm, courtesy Galerie Buchholz
At Galerie Buchholz (Fasanenstraße 30) is now possible to see a new solo show by German artist Anne Imhof (1978) open until 21June 2025. The exhibition features a sound installation, performance sketches and large format canvases that were referred to as the painterly counterpart of the latest performance work “Doom: House of Hope” staged in March 2025 at Armory Park in New York City. These large canvases represent human figures under a distorted filter that ultimately recall the noise of the pictures taken to a LCD screen, which in fact were the starting point for this series. The artist sampled stills from movies and processed them into different steps to get a final image that was impressed on the canvas. Subjects are blurred but still recognisable although their identities remain mysterious: the result is disorienting and beautiful. On show there is also a vast selection of preparatory drawings for the performance that show the blueprints and instructions for “Doom: House of hope” and some drawings made during the process and the development of the ideas. Imhof’s music installation is in a separate room at Fasanenstraße 31, where a curved set of speakers usually hung on the corners of concert halls lies on the ground forming a semi-circular shape. The title, “Doom’s rib” explicitly quotes the Armoury Park performance, playing with the possibility to bring a piece of that in the art gallery and with the shape of the object laid flat. The tune playing ranges from original music to text recitations and performances of virtuoso classical ballet.
Tobias Spichtig, “Taxi zur Kunst”, 2025, oil on canvas, 180 x 220 cm, courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts
Contemporary Fine Arts (Grolmanstraße 32-33) is now hosting a new solo show by Swiss artist Tobias Spichtig dedicated to his latest paintings production. Spichtig (1982) lives and works between Berlin and Paris. He is a painter and sculptor, although his artistic practice also includes photography, sound, and installation. Just at the entrance, on the left, a large canvas shows a girl who rides a red cab melting in the darkness of a starry night. This work carries the same title of the exhibition: “Taxi zur Kunst”, a pun with the title of magazine “Texte zur Kunst”, whose back cover had been advertised by CFA gallery for many years. As for the title, Spichtig says: “The process is a bit like a joke. A magical joke”, working with this tension between ambition and ironic distance, with the actual paint and the mythology of painting made of its ritual and metaphors. Moving through the paint one might get lost inside the beautiful strokes and traces of the pigment that stands on its own where details like hands and a piece of clothing emerge from blurred backgrounds or otherwise get in touch with the subjects, mostly friends and acquaintances of the artist that stare at you with their big eyes. Spichtig’s paintings evoke an atmosphere of intimacy and distance at the same time where paint and human presences become one, traces and memories are hard to grasp and to be fixed and they still move when they’re impressed on a surface that sometimes escapes its dimension like in a painting showing art collectors from the point of view of the canvas. The rituals to which the canvases undergo make them helpless, forcing them to take part without having a word to say about what happens around them. In this exhibition the feeling is that they silently got back their space and their autonomy.
Cyprien Gaillard, “Retinal Rivalry”, 3D motion picture, DCI DCP, dual 4K projection at 120fps, 2-channel audio, courtesy Sprüth Magers
Not far from Hackesches Markt at Oranienburger Straße 18 you can find the Berlinese venue of Sprüth Magers, hosting a new solo show by Cyprien Gaillard (1980) that you can visit from until 26 July. On show there is an immersive video installation and two wall sculptures by the French artist. The video, projected on a large screen in a completely dark room, is to be seen with 3d glasses, provided at the entrance, and takes you to a kaleidoscopic vision of the earth surface under different and divergent perspectives. The title, “Retinal Rivalry” refers to a phenomenon of the human sight that takes place in the moment when two conflicting images spark at the same time, leading to discomfort and confusion as one of the two is suppressed instead of blending with the other one. Gaillard captures more than the human eye can perceive by shooting at 120 frames per second and takes the viewer to a hyper-vision of reality. The camera constantly shifts angle and pace, ranging from fixed camera shots and slow moving to high-speed recordings of the urban landscape. In this way we get the impression that the tension between nature and the human presence is being explored. Gaillard’s psychedelic work shows us unusual perspectives as in the scene where the camera explores the inside of the head of the Bavaria statue in Munich or in the case of a shot taken from a rodent’s point of view that follows its rush on the soil ultimately ending in front of an ATM machine.
Klára Hosnedlová, “Embrace”, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof, ph. Enrico Boschi per Juliet
The Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art (Invalidenstraße 1) inaugurates “Embrace”, a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Klára Hosnedlová (Czech Republic, 1990), commissioned by the Chanel Culture Fund. The exhibition title, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, suggests the idea of physically embracing, while also metaphorically committing to or actively taking up a concept. This tension encapsulates Hosnedlová’s poetics, whose work has often been associated with the domestic sphere in relation to political context, with apocalyptic intrusions and sci-fi scenarios reminiscent of the Czech Republic’s post-Soviet history, straddling both avant-garde influences and the rural dimension of specific border regions marked by a combination of industrial and artisanal production processes. Enormous textile sculptures, reaching up to nine meters in height, pervade the atrium of the former railway station. They resemble portals made of organic material, whose colours take on the hues of dying, withered, petrified vegetation. Interwoven among their filaments and tangles are fragments of the embroidered canvases described earlier. Despite their stillness, there is the impression that movement could occur at any moment, reactivating a mysterious, dormant life force. All around, large sculptures are affixed to the walls, reminiscent of limestone formations and dinosaur fossils, some incorporating embroidered fabric inserts. The tiled floor of the hall has been partially removed to accommodate patches of soil and hay bushes, irrigated by puddles reflecting the light from the glass-ceilinged roof. The concept of utopia has always been central to Hosnedlová’s work. In this collaboration with the Berlin institution, the artist seems to find a community of shared intent, constructing fertile ground for imagining a future development unafraid to confront its own past.
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Born in Bologna, he studies fashion design and multimedia arts at the IUAV in Venice. He believes in the possibility of crossing boundaries between disciplines and that art can have an active role in breaking down inequalities and uniting people by creating communities.
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