Galerie Max Hetzler is one of the galleries that shaped how German contemporary art was shown and sold from the 1980s on. Max Hetzler opened it in Stuttgart in 1974 and moved to Cologne in 1982, where he showed the painters around Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Günther Förg at a time when Cologne, not Berlin, was the centre of the German art trade. In the mid-1990s the gallery came to Berlin: first a space in Charlottenburg in 1994, then Zimmerstraße in Mitte, later the Osram-Höfe in Wedding, and from the end of 2013 two spaces in Charlottenburg. It also runs galleries in Paris and London.
The programme sits between museum-level painting and sculpture of the post-war decades and international contemporary art. Artists the gallery has worked with over the years include Bridget Riley, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen.
The Berlin space on Potsdamer Straße, in the Mercator Höfe complex, puts the gallery in the middle of the strip between the Kulturforum and Bülowstraße where many of the city's bigger commercial galleries now cluster. The second Berlin space, at Bleibtreustraße 45 in Charlottenburg, is closed for renovation until 15 January 2027.
Visiting
- Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
- Entry: free, no booking needed.
- Current show: Sean Scully: Block, 20 November 2026 to 13 February 2027, opening on Friday 20 November, 6–8pm.
- How long: a single show takes 20–40 minutes; plan more if you combine it with the neighbouring galleries.
Getting there
U1 Kurfürstenstraße is about five minutes on foot, U2 Bülowstraße a little further south. Buses M48 and M85 run along Potsdamer Straße.
Nearby
Galerie Tanja Wagner is around the corner on Pohlstraße. The Neue Nationalgalerie is about ten minutes north on foot, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is on the Landwehrkanal at Schöneberger Ufer.