From 30 April to 3 May 2026, the iconic main hall of Tempelhof Airport will once again become a hub of the international art scene. Running alongside Gallery Weekend, 69 galleries from 13 countries will present outstanding works of contemporary and modern art created using paper as their medium.
Image above: courtesy of paper positions berlin
The art fair paper positions berlin has announced the first highlights of the event. The artworks on display showcase a wide variety of approaches to and interpretations of drawing and the medium of paper – in all their radicalism and subtlety. These are the first highlights:
Carmen Schaich – The Aesthetics of Rupture
Carmen Schaich (born 1987 in Stuttgart) works at the intersection of precision and destruction. Somewhere between technical perfection and an exploration of blind violence, her work emerges from a process that appears both controlled and radical: glass becomes the medium, impacts become lines, and thus fractures and collateral damage become drawings. The artist has developed her own intaglio technique for this particular mode of expression – glass etching.
The artist will be exhibiting at paper positions berlin 2026, represented by the Petra Rinck Gallery from Düsseldorf.
Kubra Khademi – Lines as rebellion
Kubra Khademi (born 1989 in Afghanistan) works in a realm where the body becomes a political weapon and drawing an act of rebellion and resistance. Her art is a response to the systematic invisibility of women and the brutal reality of exile. Through the archaic power of mythological narratives and the provocation of performance, she creates work that radically redefines the boundaries of shame, power and freedom. With a defiant, naive aesthetic, she transforms the private into the political and oppression into a stage for an irrepressible feminine strength that can be translated from Afghanistan to the whole world.
The artist will be represented at paper positions berlin 2026 by Galerie Eric Mouchet from Paris.
Annegret Soltau – Photographs of pain
In Annegret Soltau’s (*1946 in Lüneburg) work, photography becomes a tool for making pain and suffering visible. It resembles a radical dissection of the self, in which one’s own face and body are not merely depicted, but stitched together, bound and reassembled with black thread. Through the aggressive punctures of the needle and the obsessive structure of the sewing thread, works emerge in which concepts of identity, motherhood and female fragmentation are brutally brought to the fore. An uncompromising approach that makes traumas visible and transforms injuries into stylistic devices and graphic traces.
The artist will be exhibiting at paper positions berlin 2026, represented by Galerie Bachlechner from Graz.
A.R. Penck
The exhibition will feature some very special works by A.R. Penck (b. 1939 in Dresden; d. 2017 in Zurich), offering an unfiltered insight into his early work. Long before his world-famous ‘system pictures’, these portrait sketches display a nervous immediacy, yet even then every line is precisely where it should be. The Holthoff Gallery in Hamburg presents a discovery of rare intensity: charcoal drawings from the late 1950s, which Penck created with quick, searching strokes directly over the printed pages of old books. The paper – found, used and repurposed for magnificent drawings – becomes the medium of his artistic self-assertion, in which the human physiognomy of the sitter prevails over the rigidity of the printed typography. These early works make tangible the moment when a sketch becomes an existential work.
The artist will be exhibiting at paper positions berlin 2026, represented by Galerie Holthoff from Hamburg.
Stefanie Moshammer
Stefanie Moshammer (born 1988 in Vienna) moves in her work between highly personal storytelling and a feverish documentation of our present. In her visual worlds, the boundaries between concrete experience and aesthetic staging blur into a distinct and intensely dense reality. The Austrian artist uses the medium of photography not merely to capture fleeting moments, but as a research tool: Through the deliberate use of light, extreme colour saturation and textures, the paper on which she prints becomes a repository for themes such as identity, longing and global digital transformation. With her camera, Moshammer dissects the more hidden layers of our everyday lives and renders the tensions between private intimacy and societal fractures accessible.
The artist will be represented at paper positions berlin 2026 by the Roberta Keil Gallery in Vienna.
Gottfried Honegger
Gottfried Honegger (born 1917 in Zurich; died 2016 in the same city) worked at the intersection of mathematical logic and artistic freedom. His body of work, which interweaves strict geometry with the play of chance, yields pieces of timeless, almost meditative clarity. The co-founder of the Zurich Concrete Art movement did not view his grids as a prison, but as a form of liberation: through the precise manipulation of volume, structure and colour, the paper becomes a field of visual discipline that resists arbitrariness. In his quest for the absolute form, Honegger has radicalised the technique of ‘pliage’ (folding) and the computer-based random calculations of his time, in order to make the order of the world tangible to us.
The artist will be represented at paper positions berlin 2026 by the Brita Prinz Arte gallery in Madrid.
WHEN?
Opening: Thursday, 30. April 2026, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 30. April until Sunday, 3. May 2026
WHERE?
Flughafen Tempelhof – Main hall
Platz der Luftbrücke 5
12101 Berlin
