4.5 the Alte Nationalgalerie is a key museum in Berlin art exhibition landscape, focusing on…read more18-19th century European painting and sculpture, and based on the crowds on the day I was there, is very popular with visitors. With conceptualization beginning in the 1830-40s, the basis of the collection began with a bequeathment of 262 works from banker Joachim Heinrich William Wagener upon his passing in 1862. The building was completed in 1876 at the direction of King Frederick William IV of Prussia based on original designs in a Neoclassical style by Friedrich August Stüler, which after his death were completed by Johann Heinrich Strack. During WWII, much of Museumsinsel was damaged by bombing, with holdings displaced between East and West Germany, and the museum's collections only reunited after the 1990 fall of the Berlin Wall. Restorations began then and continued thru the 90s, reopening in 2001 to the public. Their permanent collections include Friedrich, Cézanne, Renoir, Manet, Monet, von Menzel, Liebermann, etc. You could quickly walk thru the entire 2.5 floors in about 45 minutes though if you want to listen to more of the descriptions and background for some pieces via the free audio guide provided you could easily spend 2.5 hours here. I do wish for the pieces without audio guide that there was more info provided outside the name of the work, artist, year of completion, and method of acquisition. Tickets are €12 regular adult, €6 discounted for student/seniors/patrons with disabilities, either online in advance or in person. Also available is a single museum island day pass (24 hours) for €24, a Berlin Museum Pass for €32 exists which allows admission over 3 days to 30 museums around Berlin, or different options of the Berlin Welcome card (varied prices). Separately, admission is free the first Sunday of each month, though be forewarned the lines are long. I waited over an hour to enter here in October, though the wait was only 10-15 minutes at other museums. Tickets are distributed on site only for free Sundays. Normal hours are Tue - Sun: 10:00 am to 6:00 pm, closed Mondays. Note: The museum building has elevators though is not entirely mobility-handicap accessible due to the split-level construction of part of the galleries.

What a great art museum. And I finally got to see some of Caspar David Friedrich's work in person…read more My mom and I went here a few months ago as one of our main points of interests in Berlin and it didn't disappoint. It's also in a really nice area known as Museum Island where there are a ton of other museums in walking distance. This museum has so many paintings and sculptures, you could spend a whole day seeing everything. This is a great museum that I would love to visit again.

My favorite museum on the island. It has the famous gates that are a must see. It sold out for…read morethe day and there was a line at opening so get your tickets ahead online and put them in your smartphone wallet. They have a nice cafe with some good cakes and pastries. I recommend packing a picnic since the food options are limited in the area.

This is the most popular museum on the island, but I was not bowled over considering the wait. BIG…read moreHINT reserve your ticket time slot ahead of time. Even if you buy a multi-pass you still have to reserve a time of visit. The big appeal is the Roman entryway/Courtyard and castle facade. Sometimes you have to see for yourself what all the hype is about. One of the wings is closed and some of the Greek sculptures are on display at a separate building.

The craziest and coolest thing we did in Berlin. Had no idea what to expect but the guide and his…read morestories were so interactive and funny that time flew by. It's unfortunate that we can't take pictures but these images are forever in my mind. If you're in Berlin and are looking for something not touristy and off the beaten path, this is a must!

Because what is Berlin about besides having a weird experience with a congenial host, a dark…read morebasement, and some crazy robot monsters? So much fun -- a real high point in our trip! We love the inventiveness, the ideas, the sense of being somewhere down a rabbit hole of creativity. A couple of notes - $10 euro, cash only, and the show times are now on the hour not the half-hour on the website.

My first stop in Berlin and on my list of must-visit spots if you're into western art. Located in a…read moremuseum district (different from museum island), this museum is part of the Kulturforum group of museums*, which is nearby the Berlin Philharmonic and Kammermusikaal concert hall. It's a little more than 10 min walk west from Potsdamer Platz. Tickets are €16, (~$16.50USD currently) and can be purchased online or in-person, and arriving around 2pm on a Friday afternoon the short line took about 10 minutes. You can also purchase one-day tickets to all the museums in the Kulturforum for €4 more which I didn't realize until after the fact or I would've done that. You can't pay the difference to upgrade the ticket. They don't allow larger bags or backpacks so these can be checked for free with a €1 coin (returned upon retrieval of your items) in the lockers in the basement. The main special exhibit when I visited was on the works of Frans Hals. They assembled a large number of works, maybe around 100, including some of his contemporaries and artists coming out of his workshop. The gallery was laid out mostly in chronological order and I greatly appreciated their effort in providing both German and English descriptions for every work. There are many other pieces outside of this exhibit by well-known or lesser-known artists. Some names you may recognize include Rembrandt, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Johannes Vermeer, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Dürer. I really enjoyed perusing their entire collection! If you take your time I'm sure you could easily spend 5 hours here though I given the time of day I spent around 2.5 hrs. There is a museum cafe available on the second floor accessible from the Kulturforum lobby, and a museum store also adjacent to the lobby. Bathrooms or located in a few diff locations including by the lockers in the basement. Easily reachable by public transportation and some walking, or parking is located in various lots/structures nearby. *consists of: Gemäldegalerie Kunstbibliothek Kunstgewerbemuseum Kupferstichkabinett Neue Nationalgalerie

This museum was awesome and it was fun to take an electric scooter to…read more My mother and I visited this museum a few months ago and when we got there we ran inside as it was a tad close to closing time. They won't let you take big coats or anything inside the actual museum so I had to rush downstairs to the lockers to put my stuff away. This is one of the coolest museums in Berlin, IMO. They had some paintings that I have been wanting to see for years so it was well worth the trip. They have a TON of paintings and art here, it was overwhelming, in a good way. When I'm in Berlin again, I will definitely be going back.

Despite being a pain to get to, this modern gallery is well worth a visit; the art starts before…read moreyou even get in the building with a couple of cool external installations. Inside, the lower atrium contains the larger contemporary installations such as a to scale blow-up tank and the frame of a house's plumbing system (more exciting than it sounds - I promise). There's are a few rooms off the main hall for mainly audio and visual installations, and the gallery upstairs traces some of the strands that have led to the development of modern art. Overall, the lighting and whitewash provide the artists with a good neutral canvas. Thankfully, the art, whilst modern, is not too abstract to be enjoyed by armchair enthusiasts - although I'm not sure how often the exhibitions last. There are the obligatory cafe and shop too for when you are all cultured out.

Berlinische Galerie came highly recommended by my friend who lives in Berlin. As I did research I…read morelearned that this gallery/museum has an extensive collection of DADA artist. I am a fan of the DADA art movement and coming here was amazing. My favorite lady DADAist Hannah Höch was amongst some of my favorite dadaist and seeing her work in person and her DADA dolls that I have only seen in books was amazing. The Prussian Angel was also a highlight for me. There is a permanent collection on the art movement happing in Berlin in the 1800 - 1980.. The other rooms of the gallery feature some amazing artist and installations. This place is amazing..

Another great stop when visiting Augustr. is the KW. This…read morevenue is well known for producing and presenting contemporary art in Berlin (and around the globe). In their exhibitions they bring together German and international artists. They have their own collection and also change many temporary programs. During my visit I got to see the Secret Surface, which brought to life a mix of feelings and sensations of the contemporary world and how we relate to it. I specially liked this piece where we sat down and saw many text conversations -- for me it was clear how we changed our communication nowadays. There was also a video piece talking about Syrian and Israel, and most of the conflicts that happened, since during the last four years, the NGO has smuggled humanitarian aid to the besieged population to Syria. Will definitely come back to check out future exhibits. It's worth the visit.

KW is Berlin's top space for exhibiting contemporary art. Since 1998 it has hosted the Berlin…read moreBiennial. This summer's edition is different from the past ones. In the downstairs gallery there is an encampment of the sort that Occupy movements have set up in cities. There are tents, brochures, graffiti, posters, and occasional assemblies. The galleries upstairs feature work that seems closer to agitprop than it does to art--a deliberate choice on the part of the curator, Artur Zmijewski, who writes in his introduction to the catalog that contemporary art doesn't interest him any more. A Powerpoint presentation by Antanas Mockus, formerly the mayor of Bogota, Colombia, discusses his campaigns against the drug business and traffic deaths that involved elements of performance art (respectively: when he got death threats from drug lords he started wearing a bulletproof vest with a heart-shaped hole cut over his heart, and he had mimes line up along sidewalks). In the presentation he says this is "sub-art = art without the pretenses of art." Everything at the Berlin Biennial could probably be described as sub-art. For example, one room has a lopsided circle of screens, each of which displays documentation of a protest that took place somewhere in the world in the last year. It looks like a complex video-art installation, but when I was inside it I felt like I was at a protest meeting, an assembly of assemblies where I couldn't possibly see and focus on the whole thing at once but I still got an impression of a worldwide movement that I could potentially belong to. Likewise, the Occupy encampment on the ground floor looks the sprawling, cluttered installations you see at a lot of biennials, combining a variety of images, texts, and objects. But the sharp cuts between old radical documents (a printout of the 1996 "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace") and current, useful information (a flyer with instructions on how to get from Berlin to Occupy Frankfurt next week) make it feel like something else. Maybe, because of its position right at the entrance, it's supposed to be a proposition about how works of sub-art engage each other in dialogue. To be honest, I have never liked "political art." When art has a direct message it becomes one-sided and shallow. But I didn't want to judge the Berlin Biennial by the criteria of art because it defines itself as non-art, as sub-art that is occupying a kunsthalle. Of course, there are individual works here with legible agendas. But it's like an Occupy meeting, where there are people handing out leaflets or starting discussions to promote their own pet causes, but they're still working under the umbrella slogan of "no demands," a rejection of the present system that refuses to participate in its politics. This Berlin Biennial presents an aesthetics of "no demands." Instead of issuing the sort of bland political statement that biennials usually give when they try to get political, it rejects familiar exhibition formats and the expectations people have for contemporary art. It's a biennial and an anti-biennial--a position that has the ambiguity and richness that makes for good art but also feels different and new. That's the impression I got, and it was exciting for me. A lot of people I talked to about the Berlin Biennial hated it. They thought it was political art and it didn't have teeth, that in spite of its good intentions it was disconnected from life, that it cheapened the Occupy movement by turning it into an installation. By doing this project at KW with funds from the German government, these critics say, Zmijewski et al are capitulating to the system that the Occupy movement rejects. To me this sounded a bit like the people who call Occupy protesters hypocrites because they use laptops made by successful corporations. But that's ridiculous. You don't start a co-op that makes its own computers from scratch to organize a protest. You don't build an Institute for Sub-Art to have a biennial. You just use the means that are available to you and in using them you remake them. I also heard rumors about corruption, mismanagement of funds, complaints that artists were not paid fairly. These are probably true. But in the end I can only evaluate an exhibition space based on my personal experience there, and my experience at KW was very positive. If you are set in your ideas about what a biennial or other big group show should look like then maybe KW (especially with this Biennial!) is not for you. But if you are open to new ideas and like to be intellectually challenged I would highly recommend it! TIP: You don't have to walk through the ticket office to get to the galleries and the attendants don't check tickets so it's really easy to see the show without paying. I did it twice.

Overview: Great Egyptian exhibits, some interesting additional exhibits. If you love history or…read moremuseums, this is a must see in Berlin. Number one reason to visit the Neues Museum is the Egyptian exhibits including seeing the original Queen Nefertiti. Beyond the fantastic Egyptian exhibits, there are many additional excellent artifacts and exhibits including a German medieval gold hat (which was also a celestial calendar), a contemporaneous coin showing an image of Charlemagne, and much more. In some parts of the museum we encountered displays there were broken and displays that were simply empty. Time budget: 3-4 hours minimum Overall cleanliness: excellent Bathroom cleanliness: excellent WiFi: some areas had free WiFi, but it was spotty Unique gripe: At the Nefertiti exhibit, photographs near the exhibit were prohibited. Visitors had to stand about 20 to 25 feet away from the exhibit to take photos. Very odd. Misc: No water fountains or bottle filling stations.

Their website needs work. Maybe it is the English side that is bad, but the website makes it…read moredifficult to find the hours of this museum. The website was also very vague about the Pergamum Museum being closed for 10 years for renovations! This is located on Museum island in the heart of Berlin. We walked here on a freezing cold day. We did not have tickets before hand. We arrived to the main entrance and were told NO, we needed to buy tickets in the side entrance. So we walked to the side. We entered and we were told NO, go downstairs. So we went downstairs to the same door that is the main entrance but we had to go around? Who knows, just be prepared to be confused by the signs and the docents. There are three people at the counter. 1 is for information only. 2 is the tickets only. 3 is audio guide only. I can see in the peak of summer that reservations and pre-paid is a good idea. We waited in line for roughly 6 minutes before we purchased our tickets. They try to do the upsell, but the only museum we wanted to see the Pergamum museum is closed for 10 years for renovations! They were not happy that museum is closed as well. Coat check: There is a free coat check. The lady will give you a number and just return it to get your coat. This museum is worth the money and the visit. There is quite a lot of Egyptian art on display that it can be overwhelming. The highlight is Nefertiti bust. She is quite beautiful to look at, but the museum does not allow photos of close. You have to be in the hallway where it is very difficult to get a photo because all the tourists are stopping and staring at her. Here are 3 tips: 1. Use a camera with a telephoto lens to zoom in and capture her 2. Rest your iPhone on the sign to keep it steady to get a great photos 3. If you have a young child, have them go and stand next to her, the docents are really nice and will make the tourists stop to allow the parents to snap a photo of their child and that is your opportunity to get a good photo too. You also learn a great deal about the Copper, Bronze and other ages and history of Germany. Bathrooms: very clean and free

I finally made it to Zeiss planetarium after years of passing by but never actually visiting…read more We came here for a show about the planets with our son. It was a bit different than I expected (a lot of talking and Q&A with kids, as opposed to a show where you sit back and watch some narration), but he seemed to enjoy it. The facilities are nice and the projector is cool! I would like to see another show here, but perhaps one that's a little more "advanced" and for enjoyment more than school groups.

A nice way to pass some time & also learn something :) I took my friends son ( 6 years old) and he…read morereally liked it. The program was appropriate for the age group, and I even found myself picking up some new knowledge! He wants to go back for the planet program and I will gladly take him there again.

Urban Nation is an amazing place for art lover…read more I"ve been here couple times and never got bored or disappointed. The gallery offer many amazing works from different artists. I love most the style they presented and great to get some new inspiration. It is free to visit and they usually change each exhibition between 1-3 months period of time. So visitors can have more time for the exhibition they interested at. They also paint the wall of the building outside time to time, very cool and camera ready.

Great museum that has an amazing art- graffiti/street art style…read moreInteresting stories behind pieces You can make some pretty cool photos there And the best part that it's free!

I always have the need to visit the modern art museums when I'm traveling. I'm curious to see what…read moreis being shown around the world. I decided to visit this one even though it involved an exhibit by Yoko Ono. The building looks like a simple, square building from the exterior. You go downstairs to purchase tickets. It cost $20 Euro. I had to drink all my water. No water bottles allowed around the art exhibits. I checked out the Yoko Ono "experience" first. You know, observer as artist. The audience partakes in taping pieces of broken white ceramic pieces and placing them on a white shelf to be observed. I did not participate. There are exhibits on the first floor and basement levels. More artwork than what I expected. They have a great collection of old and modern art. Many statues outside to observe. They set aside one door to enter and exit. I finished my visit with the interactive installation on the first floor. It had instructions posted before you could enter. The instructions were to take off your shoes and walk through slowly. It was one of those feelings where you actually do become a little disorientated and claustrophobic. My favorite piece.

The is one of the truly great art museums. I mean, it is really-really good…read more Like many museums the exhibits here are in a constant state of flux. Thus, there are always new art-viewing experiences to be had. The art in this museum is housed in a very beautiful, architecturally well-designed, structure. It is quite nice to simply stand outside and view. Plus, there is a lot of outdoor space around this museum. So, you can sit back and take in the day either before you go inside or afterwords. In terms of the interior gallery space, this museum is broken up into numerous rooms. The art is nicely separated by artist or by school of art. It is really a nice experience walking from room to room, taking in the various forms of art and artist that is offered. There is also a very nice curated outdoor art space associated with this museum. There you will see nice sculptures and the like. Overall, this is one of my favorite Art Spots in Berlin. Great Museum showing Great Works of Art!