Why a contracting market – whisper it – might actually be good for the art
An event like Gallery Weekend Berlin, whose 21st edition synchronised the openings of new shows by 52 galleries, is typically more interesting for viewers in a bearish art-market climate than in a bullish one. When wealthy fish are biting, it’s tempting for gallerists to present dependably saleable artists at their most on-brand. There was, admittedly, some of that this time – witness Max Hetzler’s sumptuous but deeply familiar show of big, classic-iconography photos by Thomas Struth: dense jungles to high-tech laboratories, blue chips of the deepest shade.
Or Konrad Fischer’s cavalcade of coolly typological photographs by Struth’s tutors, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Or Buchholz’s show of Anne Imhof paintings, souvenir product from the scalding-hot live artist. Capitain Petzel’s showcase for new-signing Monica Bonvicini was primarily a classic theme-and-variations show focused on the Italian artist’s kinked-out tubular minimalist structures wrapped in leather belts; and Buchmann wheeled out some signature unfurling Tony Cragg sculptures plus half a million works on paper.
But against the uncertain backdrop of a contemporary art market in its third year of contraction, and even while not all echelons appear to have been equally affected (cheaper art is seemingly faring better), a surprising number of galleries appeared to throw up their hands and instead chase the elusive currencies of credibility and individuality. How else to explain BQ’s decision to spotlight, via guest curator Daniel Baumann, the little-known mid-1990s St Petersburg performance group The Brotherhood of New Blockheads, via lens-based documentation of the 100 or so pointedly illogical performances they staged in their five-year existence? (Maybe there’s some oblique critique of the Russian state here, but still.) A couple of doors down, Mountains rewound to the same timeframe using David Medalla’s time on a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency in 1997–98 as a starting point for a taster miniretrospective of the Filipino artist’s practice, ranging from his 1960s ‘auto-creative’ foam-pumping bubble machines (Cloud Gate, 1964/2017) to neons, drawings, archival materials and bright, densely coded neo-primitive paintings featuring Medalla and allusions to his queer community and activism. Mountains is a small storefront gallery; this time-travelling show made it feel like a Tardis.
Galerie Judin, meanwhile, split the difference between idiosyncrasy and saleability by spotlighting obscure French painter’s-painter Camille Bombois (1883–1970), intermingling his admittedly lovely, finicky portraits and tranquil manicured landscapes with works by living figurative painters (Louis Fratino, Ryan Mosley, Esther Pearl Watson) inspired by him. Other ad hoc mixes of commercial and refusenik surfaced elsewhere. Neu’s smartly idiosyncratic and sincere SoiL Thornton show scattered thousands of brightly coloured pompoms across the floor, one supposedly for each day of the New York-based artist’s life so far and constituting a self-obscuring self-portrait – and, the opening suggested, a zingy chromatic backdrop for a scrum of gormless, glossy influencers who, in turn, would presumably advertise the gallery with their posts (decentralized portrait selves, 2025). Elsewhere in the show Thornton offered, inter alia, a numbed-out video playing block colours and, in a series of screenshots and texts (A years worth of calm soothing…, 2025), a winding textual tale of precarious artworld economics involving the artist losing some art after not being able to cover storage costs, finding it listed for auction online and unsuccessfully attempting to buy it back, and pragmatically turning the experience into (this) new work.
At Nagel Draxler, more Russia: a solo by Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova whose contents included a walk-in replica of the artist’s former cell in a Russian penal colony; vitrined vials labelled ‘Putin’s Ashes’ (PUTIN’S ASHES – 100 G, 2023); wall-mounted, stylised, pink-and-black reliefs depicting the constituents of a Molotov cocktail (MOLOTOV KIT [gasoline] and [acetone], both 2024); and tidily punky black-on-silver paintings featuring silhouetted faces, crucifixes, emoji hearts and memelike phrases such as ‘yes sex is great but have you ever fucked the system’ (YES SEX IS GREAT BUT / SILVER CANVAS, 2025). Not much of this matched the visceral bravery of Pussy Riot’s assembled videos in their recent retrospective at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, but the facts of Tolokonnikova’s biography and the feeling that sales might underwrite further resistance placed this assembly of, essentially, art objects nearer the knuckle than most of the offerings elsewhere. Another, more meditative, report from an embattled homeland was Sky Hopinka’s video He Who Wears Faces on His Ears (2025) at Tanya Leighton. The footage moves from cloudscapes to increasingly psychedelic, inverted road-movie footage, presumably of the American Midwest where Hopinka’s ancestral people, the Ho Chunk, come from. Overlaid onto this imagery, word-by-newly-appearing-handwritten-word, is a calligram or shaped poem of text from Yves Bonnefoy’s 1972 poetry book L’Arrière-pays – which meditates on a spiritual hinterland concealed by the visible landscape. In the thematic background, we’re told, and mirroring the descent from air to earth, is the legend of Red Horn, a kind of intermediary between this world and another; even without details, though, Hopinka successfully buttonholed viewers with a palimpsestic articulation of the older America beneath and alongside the modern one.
And finally, one exhibition merged raw commercial appeal and stylistic innovation, old media and new ideas: Sun Yitian’s theatrical display of spotlit canvases at Esther Schipper. Sun is presently a darling of the fragmented market, which might raise hackles upfront, but she’s a masterfully eerie painter. Her taste is for disorienting, inventively composed admixtures of levels of reality and cultures: painted representations of kitsch, mass-produced figurative objects from Chinese factories that, in her stagings, sometimes spring to seeming life. A smiling yellow plastic elephant spouts water from its upraised trunk (Baby Yellow Elephant, 2024); a dead-faced doll stands amid a crackling lightning storm, her white dress containing a hinged door that opens onto a domestic cupboard full of pots and pans (Storm, 2025); Sleeping Beauty crashes out in a birch forest unaware of the grinning, red-horned black devil leaning over her; a statue of the Virgin seems no more or less alive than the woman in similar sky-blue raiment in front of her, blurrily reflected in her smartphone screen (Romantic Room, 2025). The refusal of emotional cueing and sense of interior logic in Sun’s work, its chilly cartoonishness and virtuosic execution, make for an exhilaratingly uneasy ride. For me and no doubt for many others too – if the queues stretching up several flights of stairs to the gallery were any indication – her show was the best bad time to be had all Gallery Weekend.
