Atterraggio a Tempelhof: i momenti salienti della fiera d’arte POSITIONS Berlin 2026

Landing at Tempelhof

I’ve covered art fairs for Format before—ARCOMadrid, PHotoEspaña, and more—but none have been located in a space as impactful as POSITIONS was this year. It’s an experience to walk into a location meant for airplanes and instead to find it full of art.

Berlin Art Week has dozens of events associated with it, but it has only one proper art fair, and it happens inside two decommissioned hangars at the old Tempelhof Airport. You feel it before you see any of the work: the scale of the room, light falling through glass more than a story overhead, the quiet hum of a space built for planes now filled with people engaging with art. I went in expecting an art fair. I found an experience, built for four days out of art, fashion and design booths, and engaging conversations.

POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2026 at a Glance

• Edition and scale: POSITIONS’ 13th edition ran September 10–13 across Tempelhof’s Hangars 5 and 6, growing to 96 galleries from 20 countries. That’s up from 75 in 2025.
• Regional focus: A dedicated spotlight on galleries from Türkiye sat alongside a genuinely global spread, from Seoul to Cluj-Napoca to Montreal.
• Throughline: Painting dominated, but rarely in one register. Figurative and abstract paintings shared the floor with textile, ceramic, and photography.
• Standouts: Young Ju Yim, Miriam Vlaming, Moritz Moll, and Andrew Beck among the established names; Franziska Dathe led the academy section for me.
• Access point: A whole section, SELECTED POSITIONS, stayed priced under €2,500, aimed squarely at new collectors.
• Beyond painting: FASHION POSITIONS and DESIGN POSITIONS gave 22 labels and 11 studios room to argue that clothing and objects belong in the same conversation fine art.

The Only Fair of Berlin Art Week

POSITIONS is billed as the only art fair of Berlin Art Week, the city’s larger, 140,000-visitor celebration of contemporary art that also spills into the Neue Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof. This edition put a special focus on galleries from Türkiye, and the effect, walking the aisles, was a fair that felt genuinely international rather than locally insular with booths from Seoul next to Istanbul next to Leipzig.

The fair grew this year, from 75 galleries to 96, and the growth showed up as range rather than repetition: dealers from Germany, Japan, Canada, Korea, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Türkiye, and Ukraine, alongside 28 Berlin-based galleries holding down the home turf. One German critic called it a trip around the world in a single hangar, and walking it end to end, that felt about right. A section called SELECTED POSITIONS kept a run of work priced under €2,500. This made my little heart sing at the idea that a fair this size can still make room for a first-time buyer, not just an established collector.

Four Painters I Kept Circling Back To

There were a few booths I genuinely did not want to leave.

Young Ju Yim, shown by Fils Fine Arts, paints animals and landscapes that feel sculptural rather than painted. They feature figures isolated against flat, monochrome backgrounds until they read almost like objects lit on a stage. Born in Incheon, South Korea, and trained at the Leipzig academy under the same lineage as Neo Rauch, Yim keeps returning to deer: a motif with centuries of art history behind it, rendered here with a strange, dreamlike stillness that is both graceful and faintly unsettling.

Miriam Vlaming studied under Arno Rink and Neo Rauch in Leipzig and has spent her career on what she calls the symbiosis of human and nature — figures that seem to dissolve into, or emerge from, the landscapes around them. She paints in egg tempera on large canvases, building each image through cycles of destruction and rebuilding, so the surface itself carries a kind of memory. Up close, you can see the history of the painting underneath the painting.

Moritz Moll, a Munich Academy graduate now based in Munich, works in oil, acrylic, spray paint, and collage — sometimes all in the same piece — to build portraits and everyday moments that push against their own flatness. There’s a real tension in his work between the figure sitting still and the surface refusing to.

And then there was Andrew Beck — a fellow Canadian, as it happens, working in figurative oil out of Ottawa and shown in Berlin by artnow Gallery. His paintings sit right at the edge of perception and reality, which is a strange thing to encounter unexpectedly, on the other side of the world from where he paints.

New Discoveries

This is also where a fair this size proves its worth with booths I’d never have found on my own, run by galleries I’d never heard of, showing work that stopped me mid-stride.

A FWR Galerie, Albert Scopin’s photographs of New York’s Chelsea Hotel were shot in 1969 on a painted-yellow Kodak Instamatic and only recently rediscovered. The images catch the hotel’s creative residents in unguarded, everyday moments. “New York was a phase of self-discovery for me, partly painful,” Scopin has said of the period, and the photographs carry exactly that mix.

Four painters from Romania’s Vault One Gallery; István Bába, Marius Fodor, Bogdan Szekely, and Botond Gagyi, brought the tradition of Romania’s Cluj-Napoca School of painting to POSITIONS, making four very different but equally impactful cases for the relevance of figurative painting.

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ACADEMY POSITIONS: Franziska Dathe and the Next Generation

POSITIONS sets aside a whole section, ACADEMY POSITIONS, for artists still coming up through Germany’s art academies, a friendly reminder that a fair this size can make room for people who haven’t been picked up by a gallery yet. Franziska Dathe was the artist I kept circling back to there. She paints in oil, mostly on canvas but sometimes on wood or MDF, and her subjects move easily between digital life and something much older. She seems to be having a lot of fun with material and does a great job of balancing humor and what feel like very big feelings, all while maintaining an approach that feels fully developed and confident.

She showed alongside roughly thirty other students and recent graduates from German art academies like Jahangir Abbas, Rosalie Becher, Madlin Bentlage, Lola Bott, and A Hyun Cho and the section as a whole had the particular energy of artists who are having a great time developing into great artists. The work was bold and exciting across the board.

Past the Paintings

The hangar doesn’t stop at painting. FASHION POSITIONS gathered twenty-two independent labels, curated by Diandra Donecker and Dao Tran, who treated garments less like a runway collection and more like spatial installations. There were a lot of tactile objects and conceptual statements you could walk around.

Next to it, DESIGN POSITIONS brought together eleven Berlin-based product designers, curated by Julian Daynov, working at the intersection of design, art, and applied craft. Neither section needed much explaining once you were standing in it. The line between painting, garment, and object felt less like a boundary and more like a shared set of questions about material and form. The inclusive nature of the entire fair was something really special. No high art/low nonsense, emerging artists next to established ones, and an area for accessibly priced work ensured everyone could participate, while maintaining truly high quality in all areas.

Why Physical Art Still Matters in a Digital World

At Format, we work hard everyday to help artists, photographers, and designers put their best foot forward in a largely digital world. POSITIONS was a good reminder that all of that on-screen activity is still rooted in rooms like this one: painters building a surface over months of destruction and rebuilding, a design studio testing where craft ends and object begins, an artist barely out of school already worth watching closely. Berlin Art Week only lasts a few days a year, but it’s a useful check-in on where contemporary art physically lives.

There’s a cyclical nature to the life of an artist where one needs to get out into the real world to find the inspiration that feeds their time holed up in their studio. Then, with some effort work is created and shared digitally until ready to be seen in person where hopefully the cycle can begin again.

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