Beginning immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, artists of all backgrounds and persuasions joined an already thriving, politically subversive artistic community on the Wall’s east side. Transforming the former East’s derelict buildings and abandoned factories into workshops and collectives and by scavenging materials and ideas from a collapsed social and economic system, these artists fashioned a new identity for the reunited city and, in doing so, formed the nucleus of what has today become the Berlin art scene.

With well over 300 established galleries of contemporary art and an ever-expanding network of small and temporary spaces scattered around the city, Berlin has clearly established itself as the cultural and creative capital of Europe. At the heart of this capital lies Auguststrasse, the original core of Berlin’s artistic community in the early 1990s and now home to the city’s most prestigious galleries. In the company of a practicing artist or critic familiar with the scene—this is where we begin a three-hour tour of Berlin's art galleries.

But before plunging into the galleries themselves, we’ll explore the background of this area by paying a visit to Kunsthaus Tacheles, the massive, skeletal ruin of a 1907 department store that has been occupied since 1990 by a collective of artists from all over the world. Walking through its labyrinthine, graffiti-covered warren of workshops and exhibition spaces, we’ll get a good sense of what this part of Berlin looked and felt like when the Wall fell: a crumbling but vibrant hotbed of new ideas and of new ways of creating art out of the literal and figurative rubble of the past.