by Adela Lovric // May 6, 2025
With its myriad options, the art kiez around Potsdamer Straße is a reliable mainstay during Gallery Weekend. But it’s easy to forget just how art-saturated this corner of the city has become until you’re in it again: galleries above, below, beside and around the corner from one another, all within a 10-minute walk. This year especially, it felt like the district could warrant its own spin-off event.
Spyros Rennt: ‘To Kiss Against the Fire,’ Exhibition view, Rosegarden, 2025 // Photo by Joanna Wilk
This is also due to a couple of newcomers. Rosegarden, a cultural venue just launched by the platform Frontrose, debuted with ‘Kiss Against the Fire,’ Spyros Rennt’s biggest solo show to date, which spans eight years of the photographer’s exploration of intimacy, vulnerability, queerness and nightlife. And of course, the space everyone is talking about—Die Tankstelle, a converted 1950s gas station, formerly home to Das kleine Grosz Museum—is now shared by Pace and Galerie Judin. Pace, which operates eight other locations worldwide, set up their Berlin base in this architectural gem after having expanded its presence in the city over the past two years. Catching the last moments of their joint preview didn’t grant me any deep insights or behind-the-scenes gossip. But I did get a quick look at Tom of Finland’s iconically horny homoerotic drawings presented by Galerie Judin (a very fitting choice for the famously gay neighborhood), and the seamless three-in-one showcase by Pace on the upper floor. The latter highlights the similarities in the painterly expressions of Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Nava, providing a chance for a fun guessing game.
‘Tom of Finland,’ 2025, installation view at Galerie Judie / Die Tankstelle // Photo by Trevor Good
There was fun to be had at Schiefe Zähne, too—a gallery with a fun name and a fun show to match. With Phung-Tien Phan’s exhibition still a work-in-progress at the time I arrived, the slightly disheveled look of the space completed the purposely off, “under construction” aesthetic of the sculptural installations. It’s quite a rudimentary setup, materially speaking, yet palpably well-balanced; sculptural memes of sorts that communicate the most with the least means. Assembled mainly from found objects, the works cast Ikea dinosaur plush toys in playful scenes that flirt with absurdity and mockery. With the exhibition titled ‘Kein Charakter,’ Phan seems to point to the ideas of digitally mediated identity and role-play, likely riffing on the term “non-playable character” (NPC). More of an NPC sidekick than a main character, in one of the pieces, the mass-produced toy accessorizes a doll-like outfit which, as gallerist Hannes Schmidt points out, calls to mind the AI-generated, personalized box characters currently trending online. In the adjoining room, a crudely rendered cityscape composed of uneven black panels reinforces themes of artifice and (self-)staging.
Playing with notions of the staged, fake and artificial is also central to Sun Yitian’s practice, though with an entirely different flair. Her jaw-dropping exhibition at Esther Schipper, titled ‘Romantic Room,’ presents an aesthetic that stands in stark contrast to Phan’s: while Phan rejects visual tropes of hyperreality, Yitian leans into them entirely. In a dimly lit space with darkly colored walls, a sleek display of paintings summons surrealism and upgrades it with a contemporary edge. These meticulously detailed works—each reportedly taking four to six months to complete—could be mistaken for digital prints, given their astounding technical precision and the near-total absence of visible brushstrokes. Which seems to be the point in a “medium is the message” kind of way: the technique underscores the ambiguity of the subject matter, rendering the works all the more enigmatic. In one painting, art historical references give backdrop to a figure of Ken in a selfie-type composition, leaving it to the viewer to discern which part of it, if any, constitutes the “real.” In another, a sculpture of the Madonna is painted almost as if copied from an AI-generated image, with a mirroring figure just out of frame and a perplexing smartphone display, all of which converge in a sort of Baudrillardian stalemate.
Sun Yitian: ‘Romantic Room,’ 2025, installation view at Esther Schipper, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, photo © Andrea Rossett
The uncanniness carried on at Galerie Molitor, which hosts Diane Severin Nguyen’s exhibition ‘Spring Snow.’ I arrived there as something of an uncanny presence myself, joining the artist’s private tour of the show uninvited. Fitted with curtains made of sheer white material that reappears as ruffled fabric lining the staircase, the raw concrete interior of the gallery feels softer and more mysterious, signalling both a cue of femininity and a veil of illusion. On the ground floor, a two-channel video projected on silk panels shows artificial snow falling over a jungle, juxtaposed with footage of a rotating display of schoolgirl-uniform-type outfits. Notions of purity rub against sinister undertones, creating an eerie atmosphere that can’t be easily pinned down. Nguyen points out that her works resist identification and resolution. Instead, they teem with possibility. Downstairs, a series of LightJet prints—photographs produced by immersing laser-exposed paper in a chemical bath—double down on illegibility. The images share a distinct commonality: a layer of white substance covering the photographed objects, adding texture that is echoed in the tactile quality of the white velvet–lined frames. As Salomé Burstein notes in her exhibition text, “the snow or sugar here [acts] as contour to enhance all features. Nguyen avoids photography’s tendency to flatten.”
Diane Severin Nguyen: ‘Spring Snow / Spring Clothes,’ 2025, 2-channel video installation, rear projection on silk curtains, 6:18 min // Courtesy of Galerie Molitor
For this Gallery Weekend, Šejla Kamerić’s exhibition was on my must-see list, and so I made my way to Galerie Tanja Wagner. Her work, for me, is a personal revisiting of ancestral beauty and pain, and thus, feelings bubble up quicker than thoughts, and memories override the analytical gaze. ‘In the Darkened Rooms’ features a series of polaroids capturing thorny branches pressed against the artist’s bare thighs—an act of exposing pain inflicted on women as well as of their repressed desires, both kept in the shadows of private lives. Stunted by small format and repetitiveness, their poetic refrain reveals itself to the viewer only upon close inspection. The branch motif repeats in the form of a seemingly fragile sculpture made of bronze. Kamerić’s new installation of three black crochet objects traditionally hand-crafted by women in Sarajevo rounds up the exhibition. These beautiful pieces, adorned with charms, appear either as entrapment or as a fort. They make me think of my late grandmother, who spent countless hours crocheting, pouring both love and frustration out into her precious handwork.
Šejla Kamerić: ‘In The Darkened Rooms,’ Exhibition view, Galerie Tanja Wagner, 2025 // Courtesy of Galerie Tanja Wagner
Kamerić simultaneously has a solo exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin, ‘EX YOU,’ presenting both new and well-known works in dialogue with the show at Galerie Tanja Wagner. I’ll savor it another time, along with a dozen missed highlights from the past week. After all, if you don’t leave Gallery Weekend behind with a to-do list longer than the list of things you’ve seen, you might be missing the point.
Exhibition Info
Rosegarden
Spyros Rennt: ‘Kiss Against the Fire’
Exhibition: May 3-30, 2025
instagram.com/frontrose.global
Potsdamer Straße 98a, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Pace / Galerie Judin
‘Reverse Alchemy: Dubuffet, Basquiat, Nava’
‘Tom of Finland’
Exhibition: May 2–June 14, 2025
galeriejudin.com
Die Tankstelle, Bülowstraße 18, 10783 Berlin, click here for map
Schiefe Zähne
Phung-Tien Phan: ‘Kein Charakter’
Exhibition: May 2–June 14, 2025
schiefe-zaehne.com
Potsdamer Straße 103, 2nd Floor, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Esther Schipper
Sun Yitian: ‘Romantic Room’
Exhibition: May 2–31, 2025
estherschipper.com
Potsdamer Straße 81e, top floor, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Galerie Molitor
Diane Severin Nguyen: ‘Spring Snow’
Exhibition: May 3–June 7, 2025
galeriemolitor.com
Kurfürstenstraße 143, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
Galerie Tanja Wagner
Šejla Kamerić: ‘In the Darkened Rooms’
Exhibition: May 2–July 12, 2025
tanjawagner.com
Pohlstraße 64, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
