Art Cologne: Poised Between Past and Present

COLOGNE, Germany—The entryway to the annual Art Cologne fair, which ran April 16 to 20, featured banners emblazoned with highlights from every edition of the event going back to 1967, reminding visitors that this is the world's oldest modern and contemporary art fair. It’s perhaps good marketing, since what might most immediately be on the minds of visitors and dealers alike is the fair’s recent change of leadership. After a group of German dealers wrote a letter to the organizers last winter complaining of the fair’s bitter loss of status, director Gerard Goodrow stepped down, to be replaced, starting May 1, with L.A. dealer Daniel Hug. Like Art Basel, Art Cologne is a fair that includes both cutting-edge contemporary work and modern art dating back to the 1920s and ’30s. It remains to be seen what Hug, himself a dealer of cutting-edge art, has planned.

Works by German artists like Stephan Balkenhol and Gerhard Richter did well among the largely local buying public. Mönchengladbach's Galerie Loehrl sold a handful of pieces by Balkenhol, including two small wooden figures in editions of 25, of which five sold at €14,000 ($22,000) apiece, and a wooden screen for €57,000. Abstract paintings by Richter sold at Schoenewald Fine Arts of Düsseldorf (a 1985 piece, the price of which the gallery would not disclose) and Galerie Terminus of Munich (another piece from 1985, which went for $5.5 million). Galerie Terminus also sold a large sculpture by Tony Cragg for €290,000 to a German collector, who will put it in his country house in Italy, as well as a number of works by a newer addition to its roster, Munich-based painter Jan Davidoff, who studied with Guenther Foerg, and whose pieces were selling in the €6,000 range.

Wilhelm J. Grusdat of Galerie Terminus said he has done Cologne for seven years and “hasn’t had a bad year yet,” but he, like some other dealers, hinted at the politics that have beleaguered the fair in recent years.

“This used to be like Basel, now it’s a regional fair,” said Ulla Gansfort of Schoenewald Fine Arts, “But there are strong collectors in the Rhine region who would not travel to Berlin or Brussels,” both of which also host art fairs.

The fair's biggest bargains were to be had in the booth of Palma de Mallorca's Galleria Jule Kewenig, which was selling fist-sized paintings by the Uruguayan-born Marcelo Viquez, depicting such whimsical subjects as a bra or underpants, for €200 apiece. One collector had snapped up 11 of them.

And speaking of snapping, a number of fair visitors could be seen at Zurich dealer Kashya Hildebrand's booth snapping cell phone photos of what was perhaps the fair's most attention-getting artwork, a large mixed-media piece by young Russian artist Andrei Molodkin featuring a blown-up photograph of leaders at a recent G8 meeting (Bush, Blair, Merkel, et al) with black tubing leading to a container of oil that spelled out “G8.”

One of the fair's quirkier purchases was made at the stand of Barcelona’s Galeria Manel Mayoral. Seated on a chair in the gallery’s booth was a life-size papier mâché figure dressed in a suit and sunglasses. In 1972 the Spanish group Equipo Cronica, formed in 1964 by artists Manuel Valdes, Rafael Solbes, and Juan Antonio Toledo with the aim of using Pop art as a political tool, arranged a hundred of these figures on the street and toppled them as part of a protest. The piece – one of only 30 that remain — sold for €85,000 to a toy museum in Catalonia on the day of the fair’s vernissage.

But it wasn't just buying and selling that generated buzz among dealers in town for the fair. Phillips de Pury & Co. opened its new Cologne showroom with a wine-and-canapé-fueled soiree at which Phillips head Simon de Pury and specialist Michaela Neumeister introduced the house’s new business development director — none other than Hug’s Art Cologne predecessor, Goodrow — and new office manager Marcel Krenz, also a former employee of Art Cologne. The modest two-room space had been installed for the occasion with selections of artworks to be auctioned in Phillips contemporary art evening sale next month in New York, including pieces by Dana Schutz and Richard Prince.

News also broke that Berlin dealer Michael Neff, who heads up Berlin's Gallery Weekend in May, is starting a new event called Art Berlin Contemporary that will feature 50 galleries selling wares in an old post office. The four-day event, which he has been careful not to describe as a fair, debuts in September.