Gallery Michael Werner leaves Cologne
Cologne | There was no good news for the Cologne gallery scene today. After 50 years and more than 370 exhibitions, the Michael Werner Gallery is withdrawing from Cologne. a loss.
The message begins with a quote from Winston Churchill on November 10, 1942: “This is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it’s, maybe, the end of the beginning”
Michael Werner is concentrating on his gallery space in Berlin at Hardenbergstraße 9a and will continue his work there. In October 2021 he showed works by Markus Lüpertz there in the provisional space. Werner is now closing the provisional with the exhibition “Traces of a Collector: Reiner Speck – Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les autres”. From February it will continue on the ground floor, where renovations have been going on for months. Here Werner wants to deal with the art of the 19th to 21st centuries and present and comment on the art-historical development of the last decades.
Werner is a legend in the art trade. Remember the exhibition with Benjamin Katz in the jointly founded gallery Werner & Katz with an exhibition by Georg Baselitz. Werner der Baselitz made famous, whose pictures were scandalized by the press and confiscated by the public prosecutor. Times are dying long gone.
It is the big names in art of the last few decades that adorn Werner’s work and at the same time show how strongly Werner believed in his artists, stuck to them and was ultimately right. Economic success also followed. They are: Baselitz, AR Penck, Markus Lüpertz and Per Kirkeby as well as Jörg Immendorff, Antonius Höckelmann and Sigmar Polke. Remember the documenta 6 scandal, when the curators prevented pictures by Penck, Immendorf and Baselitz as well as Gerhard Richter showed solidarity.
In 2011 Werner received the Art Cologne Prize.
In 1968 Werner came to Cologne. He started out on St. Apernstrasse, moved his gallery to Friesenstrasse and finally to Gertrudenstrasse. Werner writes: “Well, after more than 50 years I am retiring from Cologne in order to continue my work in my gallery at the new location in Berlin’s Hardenbergstrasse 9a.”
Too bad for Cologne.
Inc