Berlin Lowers the Entry Barrier Without Lowering the Bar. Notes from the POSITIONS Art Fair
While in Berlin during Berlin Art Week 2026, I also dropped into two hangars of the former Tempelhof airport, where nearly a hundred galleries were showing at the POSITIONS art fair. Walking between the booths, I kept asking myself whether a collector from Poland could feel welcome here – whether they have been buying for ten years or are only starting to look around. The short answer is yes. The longer answer follows.
POSITIONS Art Fair in Context
POSITIONS takes place as part of Berlin Art Week. This year the festival was held for the fifteenth time and brought together around 120 museums, private collections, galleries and project spaces. The organisers themselves call Berlin Art Week the largest gathering of Berlin's contemporary art scene and the starting signal for the "art autumn". Last year, more than 140,000 people passed through it in five days.
At the centre of that week stands POSITIONS, with 96 galleries from 20 countries. Polish galleries exhibit here alongside galleries from Germany, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Türkiye and Ukraine.
A Fair That Wants New Collectors
The first thing that strikes you: both the galleries and the organisers very much want to attract new collectors. How do they go about it?
First: the "Start Collecting with POSITIONS" section. A curated special exhibition where every work is for sale and priced between a few hundred and 2,500 euros. And this is no outlet clearance – there is genuinely plenty to choose from.
Second: Academy POSITIONS. Next to the "grown-up" fair there is a section for fresh graduates and students of German art academies, with Berlin design and fashion right next door. You can place your bets on who will have a booth presentation in the main hall five years from now.
Third: every work has a price next to it. Whether it costs three hundred euros or thirty thousand. You don't have to ask "so how much is it?", you don't have to steel yourself or summon up courage to find out whether you can afford the painting you have just fallen for. Anyone who has ever stood at a fair in front of an unpriced work and hidden their panic on hearing "50,000 francs" knows exactly what I mean.
Basel or Warsaw?
In terms of numbers, POSITIONS stands close to Liste Art Fair Basel: 96 galleries versus 105 galleries from 36 countries at Liste 2026. That also puts it in the same size bracket as the Warsaw Art Fair (Warszawskie Targi Sztuki), which gathered more than 110 galleries last year. In attendance – over 30,000 visitors in 2025 – it remains far behind Art Basel and its 90,000 visitors.
In terms of prestige, too, it is clearly closer to Warsaw than to Basel. POSITIONS is not a high-end fair; its strength is approachability. Liste has a global selection and works as a gateway to Art Basel. POSITIONS gathers mainly German galleries plus carefully chosen international presentations. It is a very good regional fair, not a global one.
A Bit of Central European Bias
Wherever I go, I look out for traces of Central and Eastern Europe. In Berlin I didn't have to look for long. I found the work of Marcin Jedlikowski (Van Rij Gallery, booth A17) – painting that has captivated me for more than six months and holds up even better in person than on a screen. Anna Bem-Borucka was presented by Splot Gallery from Sopot (booth A19) with monumental works on paper. And then Romania: Bogdan Székely, who simply paints very, very well.
Polish and Central European contemporary art has no reason for an inferiority complex, and it fits the Berlin POSITIONS fair perfectly.
If Money Were No Object
I start every fair with a wish list, knowing full well I can't afford it. It is the best exercise in looking: once I stop calculating whether I can afford something, I focus solely on working out whether the work is good.
In Berlin, that list included the collages of Andrea Esswein – compositions she has been making with the help of photocopiers since 1998. I was fascinated by the objects of Casper Faassen from the Netherlands, who combines print, paper, acrylic glass and painting to create representations of objects that are at once astonishingly realistic and blurred. And the paper sculptures of Annette Meincke-Nagy, which are hard to believe are really made of paper pulp.
The Little Bear
At booth C06 of Gallery Yuki-Sis hung a small painting by Sumito Sakakibara: a yellow, empty road, a white guardrail, a dark forest and, in the middle, a small black bear that clearly had no idea where it was. I looked at it for quite a while, because it captured perfectly how most people feel at their first art fair.
The organisers of POSITIONS do everything they can to make sure visitors don't feel that way. They put prices next to the objects, run a section for beginning collectors, show the work of fresh art-school graduates. If you are thinking about your first purchase and looking for a fair where nobody will size you up from your shoes to your watch – POSITIONS in Berlin is well worth the trip.