Galerie Nordenhake marks 50 years with group exhibition across Stockholm, Berlin, Mexico City

With a large group exhibition, Galerie Nordenhake celebrates its 50th anniversary. In Berlin, it will soon move from Kreuzberg to Charlottenburg.

7/19/2026, 1:32 PM

For the last time, the gallery also uses the staircase (works by Michał Budny, Ulrich Rückriem, and Spencer Finch). Photo: Gerhard Kassner

By Beate Scheder

Is this a good picture for Galerie Nordenhake, which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary in Berlin among other places, or not? In the corner, right where you enter the exhibition rooms, stands an acoustic guitar. Or rather, what is left of it: broken tonewood, frayed strings, a holey fretboard, and all of it hastily glued back together. What happened to the instrument is revealed by a video work diagonally opposite by the window. It shows the artist Sofia Hultén smashing the guitar against the wall and floor of an empty white room, piecing it back together, and starting over again, seven times in total.

"Fuck it up and start again," the title of the work explains itself—the trial-and-error principle, the creative potential that sometimes involves destruction. This principle also applies to founding and establishing a gallery; it was undoubtedly applied at Nordenhake. But nothing there today looks as patched together as Hultén's guitar.

A History Across Three Cities

In 1976, Claes Nordenhake, a self-taught art market professional, founded his gallery in Malmö, Sweden, and moved to Stockholm in the mid-1980s. In 2000, Berlin was added as a second location, a city he had been increasingly drawn to for some time, where he secured a place in the art scene and has helped shape it to this day. In 2005, Nordenhake was part of the founding circle of the Gallery Weekend. Since 2017, there has also been a location in Mexico City.

The exhibition spans all three galleries, which operate on equal footing, each with a focus on local artists. In Berlin, these include photographer Michael Schmidt, painter Sophie Reinhold, and Sofia Hultén, born in Stockholm in 1972.

The Exhibition

"Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm, Berlin, Mexico City, 50 Years" Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. Until August 29.

The group exhibition also features works connected to the gallery's history. With Berlin's history: In 2005, still in the gallery spaces on Zimmerstraße, Spencer Finch bathed the room in Prussian blue—once with pigment, once with colored light. In the current exhibition, he references the installation in box format.

And then there is the exploration of what color can do or what painting actually is. This has always been central to the gallery's program. Works like "Gul" by American Joseph Marioni from 1981 point to this, where acrylic paint layers thickly and glossily over the canvas—more a body of color than a painting, color that seems to bead off the surface like melting mango sorbet in the sun. Or "Alizarin Crimson" by fellow American painter Marcia Hafif, who mixed her own colors—in this case, that bluish-red tone—a monochrome painting from 1983, first shown that same year at the gallery, then still in Malmö.

The First Gallery to Move In

The exhibition celebrates five decades of the gallery and, for the Berlin part, also marks the beginning of a new chapter. Nordenhake is leaving Kreuzberg, moving to Charlottenburg. For nearly 20 years, Nordenhake was in the soon-to-be-former spaces on Lindenstraße. The gallerist had bought the building, built in 1912/13 for the "Kaufhaus Merkur," later the headquarters of Lufthansa until 1938, and then long vacant, together with a Swedish collector in the early 2000s, had it renovated to gallery standards (and sold it a few years ago). In 2007, his gallery was the first to move in, attracting others with the prospect of synergy effects.

There was a time when every room there was occupied by galleries. That seems like a long time ago now, where it is indeed.