Eighteen months after the worldwide credit crunch, this year's Gallery Weekend Berlin includes more galleries than ever. Indeed, with forty participating galleries and their respective openings - or as they are now mostly called ‘private views' - it is unimaginable to visit them all.

David ULRICHS

According to the organizers' communication, art flâneurs are to "feel invited" to spend three days, from 30 April - 2 May, dawdling through the galleries of Berlin - an invitation that was not extended to all of the city's big gun galleries. Thus, galleries such as Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Peres Projects or Galerie Christian Nagel, who were still part of the programme in the past, are, rather surprisingly, no longer part of ‘the in crowd'. Indeed, regular visitors will search in vain for the gallery, which since the Gallery Weekend Berlin's inception stood at the top of the list: Galerie Arndt + Partner. Under the new name of ARNDT, the entrepreneurial gallerist Matthias Arndt will open up his new space with an exhibition entitled ‘Changing The World' on Potsdamerstrasse, at the heart of Berlin's newest and most exciting gallery area. Other big galleries, such as Haunch of Venison - this year with an exhibition of Damien Hirst -, Galerie Friedrich Loock, Galerie Michael Werner (now VW (VeneKlasen/Werner), Nolan Judin, Edition Block or Niels Borch Jensen have never been part of the 3-day marathon event, this year being no exception. Nevertheless, Berlin art-world politics aside, the forty included galleries offer a rich and varied overview of the city's gallery scene. Whether participating or not, the first weekend in May is the biggest art event in the Berlin gallery year.

CHARLOTTENBURG

After its complete move to the still rather gallery-hostile area of Berlin-Wedding last September, Galerie Max Hetzler will show recent works by Monica Bonvicini, an artist who for many years has been living in Berlin. In the huge space she will show, among other works, ‘Light Me Black', 2009, a sculpture consisting of white neon tubes suspended from the ceiling. Arranged forming a tube, the light projects outwards and leaves the inside of the tube dark, while filling the space that used to house a light-bulb factory. One floor down, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, who has just opened a new space in the city's most bourgeois area Berlin-Charlottenburg, will show a solo exhibition with works by the German artist Thomas Helbig.
Galerie Haas & Fuchs, a gallery that has remained faithful to its location in West-Berlin's Charlottenburg will show a selection of 26 artists who have one thing in common: they all studied at Goldsmiths College, London under Michael Craig-Martin. The illustrious list of artists includes such reverberating names as Glenn Brown, Angela Bulloch, Thomas Demand, Liam Gillick, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. In a nearby side-street Galerie Daniel Buchholz presents a long-awaited solo exhibition by Florian Pumhösl entitled ‘Diminution'.

POTSDAMERSTRASSE

Moving eastwards to the area around Potsdamerstrasse, the galleries Klosterfelde, Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Sassa Trülzsch and Sommer + Kohl all take part in this year's Gallery Weekend Berlin. First time participants Sommer + Kohl will test the waters of the weekend with a solo show of Riccardo Previdi, an exhibition bearing the fitting title ‘Testsieger', which translated means ‘winner of the test'. In the same building, though not included in the weekend, Gallery Maribel Lopez will show Rubén Grilo - another solo exhibition. Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch will show Matias Faldbakken and Sassa Trülzsch, who joined the Gallery Weekend Berlin last year, will show two artists: the Berlin-based Fiete Stolte and Terry Fox. Each exhibition here follows strict protocol. A gallery artist, in this case Fiete Stolte installs an exhibition in the main gallery space and invites an external artist to realize a project in the gallery's adjoining tower-cum-winding staircase. In the recently opened 1st-floor gallery of Martin Klosterfelde, the Canadian artist and veteran jazz musician Michael Snow will have a solo exhibition. Snow, who has not shown at the gallery since 2002, will show new works.
Galerie Neugerriemschneider will be showing two exhibitions this year. In their main gallery they will host a group show entitled ‘Lost and Found', which will include a mixture of films, photographs and sculpture. A highlight will undoubtedly be the installation of a library of 100 books and the sculptural work by the media-friendly Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. In keeping with this summer's sporting event, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Franz Ackermann will be showing a selection of preparatory works on paper using the image of the football. In a satellite space, an old ballroom, Neugerriemschneider will present recent works by the American painter Elizabeth Peyton. One of her very first exhibitions was mounted in a room of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, with others being held at unusual venues, which included a pub and a private apartment. The exhibition in the ballroom continues this lineage of showing Peyton's work in unusual settings.
Galerie Mehdi Chouakri will be showing works by Hans-Peter Feldmann in an exhibition entitled ‘Noch' ne Ausstellung [another exhibition]', which will include a series of hand prints based on the work of the late Charlotte Wolff. Wolff studied palmistry and the occult and befriended the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s and collected handprints of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and others. She was able to publish the prints along with her research as a theory on the human hand in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. Feldmann owns the original prints and has made poster-sized copies that will be displayed in the gallery.
On a flight from Dubai to Melbourne, Andreas Gursky took some photographs of the ocean. These snapshots were to serve as inspiration for the 6-part series of photographs entitled Ocean I-VI (2009-2010) that Galerie Sprüth Magers will show on the occasion of this year's Gallery Weekend Berlin. Using images taken by satellite cameras, Gursky has searched for views that contain land as well as ocean. It is precisely the transition between land and ocean that is the subject of these photographs, in which the artist has manipulated the distance between the two opposing landmasses.

LINDENSTRASSE

In the gallery house on Lindenstrasse gallery ZAK | BRANICKA will show paintings by Pawel Ksiazek. Bearing the title ‘Poelzig vs Poelzig', the images are inspired by scenes from the horror film ‘Black Cat' (1934) directed by Edgar Ulmer. The film is set in a modernist villa, whose architecture dominates the images that the Polish artist has partly altered, partly reproduced. In this work Ksiazek's highlights the unity between the fictional world depicted in the film and the architectural reality of the architecture of the interwar period, creating an uncanny mood. In the same house, Galerija Gregor Podnar will show new works by the young Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger, who in his last exhibition at Galerija Gregor Podnar almost magically gave life to two A4 sheets of paper by uniting them in a seemingly impossible dance using a hidden technical contraption. This is the artist's second solo exhibition in Berlin.
Galerie Nordenhake is also housed in this building on Lindenstrasse and will show recent works by Spencer Finch. The exhibition will revolve around and investigate the theme of vision and illusion. One section of the show will consist of images that focus on and create optical illusions, another part will deal with the human eye and its ‘blind spot'. Finch will install heaps of cement on the gallery floor that will remind the viewer of heaps of snow. The walls will be lined with pastel drawings inspired by photographs taken by heat-sensitive cameras.
Nearby Galerie Buchmann will show new works by the Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. The artist often uses LED lights to create site-specific works that conceptually deal with current events, functioning simultaneously as a commentary or time capsule of the moment. For his exhibition at Galerie Buchmann he has produced nine all new works. At Galerie Crone, Berlin painter Norbert Bisky will show a series of new paintings and at Galerie Esther Schipper, co-organiser of the Gallery Weekend Berlin along with Tim Neuger and Max Hetzler, another Berlin artist Matti Braun will show recent works.

In its fourth edition, the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2010 has managed to establish itself firmly in Berlin and internationally, with many collectors preferring this art event to the Berlin art fair, Art Forum. With a steady increase of 3-4 galleries per year, the weekend event seems to be gathering momentum, even in these economically troubled times. Despite the outrageous participatory fee of over 5000 euro, the investment seems to pay off. Each member gallery enjoys exclusive invitations to parties and social events throughout the weekend and a white-gloved-chauffeur-driven taxi for its guests, with the gallery name displayed on the door. But even with a shuttle, visiting all forty galleries on one weekend is impossible, even for hardcore art lovers.

Gallery Weekend Berlin 2010, April 30 - May 2. More info: www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de