For Berlin Art Week – autumn’s amorphous and sprawling cousin to spring’s Gallery Weekend – galleries and institutions put on their Sunday best to compete for our attention. A newcomer among this year’s initiatives is Suite Berlin, which sees four international galleries – Mendes Wood DM, Thaddaeus Ropac, Pace, and Mariane Ibrahim – join forces for a series of talks and exhibitions. Hosted in a private townhouse, Suite Berlin reads as an invitation to intimacy and quality time – not a bad idea, as art audiences enter the busiest season of the year. To help you navigate, here is a selection of exhibitions to see at six of the city’s year-round galleries, covering everything from romantic paintings to a white cube turned scrapyard.

Richard Hawkins
‘Featuring 13 Flamboyant Fiends’
Galerie Buchholz
September 13 – October 12, 2024

With Richard Hawkins’s ‘Featuring 13 Flamboyant Fiends’ at Galerie Buchholz, viewers will be in for a rare treat. Taking the format of a mini retrospective, the US artist will show works dating as far back as his 1988 graduation from CalArts with a piece that takes as its starting point the coincidence that Franz Kafka and Tom Cruise share the same birthday. From there, Hawkins’s trajectory as an artist has taken off to include prints of zombified male models and magnificently haunted doll houses. Such works are among the ‘fiends’ on view in Berlin, as well as a group of his latest video works – always with the artist’s signature amalgamation of intimacy and theatricality.

Paul Pfeiffer
‘Revelation 21’
carlier gebauer
September 13 – November 16, 2024

The last time Paul Pfeiffer exhibited at carlier gebauer, he showed an eerie deconstruction of pop star Justin Bieber’s tattooed limbs. The upcoming exhibition expands the realm of cultural iconicity from body to architecture, with Vitruvian Figure (2015), a monumental model of the world’s largest indoor arena (the Philippine Arena, located north of Manila), taking center stage. As part of a series that includes other such venues around the world and reflects Pfeiffer’s interest in the controlled orchestration of mass hysteria, the Philippine Arena achieves renewed significance in his work as the site of a concert Bieber cancelled shortly before coming out as a born-again Christian. Once again, coincidence fosters surprising resonance.

Oliver Bak
‘Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist’
Sprüth Magers
September 14 – November 2, 2024

Sprüth Magers is set to host the German debut of Danish artist Oliver Bak, who is among the young generation of painters dabbling unapologetically, but not flippantly, in historical styles. Bak’s paintings are dense with references ranging from Symbolism through Secessionism to the more esoteric corners of Modernism. For this exhibition, he engages with the myths surrounding the Roman child-emperor Heliogabalus, as represented in an 1888 painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema as well as in Antonin Artaud’s 1933 fictional biography Heliogabalus: Or, The Crowned Anarchist. Painted on vintage fabrics in a dark palette, Bak’s pictures give form to a complicated notion of beauty infused with decadence and sexual excess.

Bod Mellor
‘People Who Knock on the Door’
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
September 10 – November 2, 2024

At Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Bod Mellor’s paintings take us somewhere more conceptual and glitchy. A new suite of portraits show prison workers as represented by actors on TV; one type of worker playing another worker, forever on the brink of exhaustion, within the mirror-version of an authoritarian society’s institutions. In classic Mellor style, funky accessories abound: a halo of oversized keys in one work, a dizzying ring of foldout chairs in another, like the stars a cartoon character sees when they have been knocked on the head. Mellor’s outlook is as meta as it is punk. Even as the mediated image serves as subject, the artist offers no illusions of glamour.

Edith Dekyndt
‘Animal Methods’
Konrad Fischer Galerie
September 13 – November 16, 2024

Edith Dekyndt’s exhibition will be her third with the Berlin gallery, but a welcome opportunity for residents who missed the artist’s big outing at Paris’s Bourse de Commerce last year. ‘Animal Methods’ will feature work in a variety of media – 3D-printed sculpture, video, found objects – in a presentation that blurs the line between organic and inorganic, as it pursues questions related to toxic substances found in natural materials. A worthy heir to the Minimalist tradition that has shaped Konrad Fischer’s program since the 1960s, Dekyndt’s register is precise and highly restrained – even as mood and materiality oscillate irresistibly between poetry and abjection.

Selma Selman
‘Ophelia’s Awakening’
ChertLüdde
September 7 – November 9, 2024

The modus operandi of Selma Selman – making her debut at ChertLüdde – is not what one would call restrained. As a kind of finissage-annex of her current exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (through September 15), ‘Ophelia’s Awakening’ will turn the Berlin gallery into a scrapyard of old cars and electrical appliances, like the one owned by the artist’s family in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Selman uses parts of Mercedes vehicles and wrecked bathtubs and washing machines as canvases for paintings in an exhibition pungently perfumed with gasoline. Safe to say, her version of Ophelia will be a far cry from Shakespeare’s tragic maiden.