41 Art Monthly no. 498 , July–August 2026 Letter from Berlin Jamboree Neither as nakedly mercantile as an art fair nor as lo ! ily totalising as a biennale, Berlin’s annual gallery weekend (now lumbering into its second decade of existence) is a peculiar a ff air. Over a weekend that with each successive edition stretches into more of a week – as galleries jockey to get their openings in ahead of one another – 67 new shows open simultaneously in the city, alongside myriad o ff -site exhibitions, panel discussions, performances, gala receptions and other less-than-subtle raids on the art attention economy. So it goes that the Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach brought the NFT Svengali Beepl’s tech overlord robots to prowl around Mies van Der Rohe’s building for the weekend, Candice Breitz hired someone to dance in a bear costume in front of Bart Simpson- style detention placards that read ‘I will not make any more political art’ for her show ‘Hot Potato’ at Kow Galerie, while Spike magazine brought Dean Kissick to a panel at the Julia Stozchek Collection to opine on how AI imagery had ‘solved the problem of desire’. Writing of the second gallery weekend for Artforum in 2006, Jennifer Allen aptly characterised the jamboree as practising a ‘commercial version of site-speci # icity’. The logic is indeed something like the mock bedrooms one # inds in IKEA showrooms. Instead of encountering art in the sterile and frenzied set-up of an art fair booth, incoming collectors can be ferried around town the weekend before they jet o ff to Venice for the Biennale preview. The absence of any curatorial master-theme corseting the chosen galleries on the main parkours into some kind of formal cohesion is at once a blessing and a curse. While this grants galleries some measure of autonomy from contorting themselves to # it a director’s vision, this looseness also results in works of wildly oscillating quality, between pick ’n’ mix, blue-chip group shows of market stars (best evidenced in this edition by Galerie Max Hetzler’s glitzy group show on self-portraiture, ‘The Self Assessed’) to more cerebral, museological exhibitions elsewhere. My ‘weekend’ began on Tuesday, with the opening of an all-British group show at Fluentum, a foundation for moving-image art housed in the former headquarters of the US Army (which prior to that was the adminis - tration of # ices for the Lu ! wa ff e). ‘Demolition/Escape’ brought new work by James Richards and Hilary Lloyd into dialogue with a superb installation of Tina Keane’s Escalator , 1988, a two-channel video installation playing across a 5-metre ascending stack of 11 video monitors. Escalator neatly schematises how the social disequilibrium of high Thatcherism trans # igured London in the 1980s: on its le ! # lank we # ind the glass and steel world of City of London speculation, while on its right the surplus populations of the city’s unhoused are shown occupying London Underground stations. Meanwhile, Richards’s new suite of posters, Travellers , also journeyed underground. Mounted against Fluentum’s fascist opulence, the posters de ! ly melded together images of luxury and horror – a cropped image of hands clutching champagne # lutes, the phrase ‘ Wehrp ! licht (conscription) is shit’ warped around an outstretched arm holding a Kalashnikov, and a dreamy swathe of light-leaked amber streetlight serves as backdrop to the phrase ‘And daytime is the loss of this’. Fluentum numbers among the several private, philan - thropic art spaces and collections that have arisen in Berlin over the past 20 years (others include the LAS Foundation, and the Julia Stozchek Collection). Later in the week I journeyed to another such out # it, the re-opening of the Boros Collection, a 32,000sq ! exhibi - tion space occupying the lightless concrete fortress of the former Reichsbahnbunker in Mitte, which features a penthouse for the eponymous advertising mogul whose collection it houses. The work on display here was largely in keeping with what one would expect from a very rich individual who might have written his master’s thesis on the aesthetics of Bond villains. The schlocky creepiness of the fairground was predominant: Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, ‘Georgia’, installation view James Richards, Travellers , 2026 42 Art Monthly no. 498 , July–August 2026 appeared. Isabella Bortolozzi displayed Adam Gordon’s weak, Richterish grayscale paintings, the Michel Majerus Estate reconstructed his unsettling suite of ‘TRON’ paintings from 1999, and Brook Hsu’s s chilly show of cerulean and dusky green paintings at Kraupa- Tuskany Zeidler continued her engagement with the open form of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion. What many of these wall-work exhibitions shared was a hyper-attenuated articulation of ultra-distinct processes. For instance, in the press text for Alexi- Meskishvili’s show we learned that the works ‘began as Instagram screenshots, which Alexi-Meskhishvili digitally altered then printed onto transparent rice paper, collaged and placed onto blank large-format negatives, which she then exposed with colourful # inger lights’. Similarly, Jan Verwoert’s accompanying text for Quietzsch’s exhibition details the artist’s ultra-medi - ated method: ‘What is painted, gets washed and in part rubbed out ... Quietzsch doesn’t use brushes to paint the # igures. He takes Teddy Bears. Like rubber stamps, he wets them in colour, presses them on the painting, and partially rubs out the imprint again.’ Within the terms of what John Roberts has theorised as the ‘skilling- deskilling’ continuum of post-conceptualist work, this ‘process fetishism’ can be read from several angles. On the one hand, there is the artist’s imminent, ter - mite-like burrowing into the subjective possibilities of what painting or photography could still become for them in the mid-2020s. On the other, in the work of Alexi-Meskhishvili, Quietzsch and Auerbach, the elaborate, chronophagic processes undergirding such outwardly lush and appealing work also seemed to function like a complex insurance or ‘moating’ strat - egy, shoring up and underwriting the intricate labour and value of certain artistic positions. Amidst a widen - ing crisis of image replication, the USP of irreplicable processes is basically good for business. George MacBeth is a writer based in Berlin. in the taut grimaces of Lukas Heerich’s sheet mask sculptures impaled on meat hooks, Pol Taburet’s pouting, conical busts and macabre etchings, and Benjamin Lallier’s gothic silkscreen on velvet of Euphoria actress Chloe Cherry – all presented not in a white cube, but an industrially chic interior of paint- # lecked Beton and wartime signage. Generously set aside in its own room in this concrete rabbit warren is Cyprien Gaillard’s Life in the Cracks , 2025, which aspired to something more genuinely haunting than a funhouse shriek. Though they initially registered as Helen Frankenthaler-style dyed canvases, these mauve- and-grey colour # ields were in fact fabric acoustic panels the artist salvaged from an auditorium renova - tion in Trieste. Their lush stains and patterned imprint accordingly emerged as the ghostly residue from years of the auditorium’s visitors’ chance impressions and accidental brushing against the panels. Along their formerly concealed edges, Gaillard had delicately hand embroidered various skeletal # igures. In its formative years the gallery weekend was notable for eschewing painting in favour of an expanded conception of contemporary art, with a focus on installation art, research-led practices, moving image and photography. Those were, however, more buoyant times for the German art market; the current dismal market outlook has brought the return of more gilt- edged media. Journeying in and out of galleries amid the hyperactivity of the Mayday celebrations (when Berlin reawakens from its long winter repose and springs stridently into action) I managed to hit a streak of eight wall-work shows in a row. At Esther Schipper, Tania Auerbach’s ‘Easy Assembly’ brought together a beguiling group of proto-pointillist canvases working from ultra-close macro photos of bubbling foam – built up from thousands of hand-painted dots. Nearby at Schiefe Zähne, Lukas Quietzsch’s ‘The Appeal of Individualism’ presented his recent series of large gouaches featuring teddy bears patterned wallpa - per-like across the canvases. Meanwhile, in her second solo show for Galerie Molitor, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s ‘Georgia’ gathered her ‘camera-less’ aluminium dye sublimations and C-types of a distant relative – whimsical, semi-aleatory psyche - delic swirls in which the forms of a # lower or a portrait Hilary Lloyd, Come Up And See Me , 2026, video THOSE WERE, HOWEVER, MORE BUOYANT TIMES FOR THE GERMAN ART MARKET; THE CURRENT DISMAL MARKET OUTLOOK HAS BROUGHT THE RETURN OF MORE GIL T-EDGED MEDIA. Grant Falardeau, installation view, Boros Collection