Is Everything We Know About Gallery E-Commerce Wrong? How David Zwirner and Gagosian’s New Initiatives Break the Rules

With their new online viewing rooms, the mega-galleries are challenging ideas about what can (and can’t) sell online in a changing art market. Galleries have been offering works to buyers digitally since at least the early days of smartphones. But back then, emailed JPGs and PDF checklists were usually used to whet clients’ appetites for […]

Young Painters Are Trying to Kill Me, Says the German Artist Albert Oehlen—But He’s Cool With It

As his new paintings and drawings go on view in Los Angeles and Berlin, the artist reflects on his experience as a young artist in Berlin in the ’70s. Albert Oehlen is something of a living legend. He might be 63, but his reputation as an enfant terrible remains. There’s something eternally youthful about the German painter, who first […]

The Kippenberger Conundrum: How the Wildly Prolific Artist’s Artist Became an Eight-Figure Auction Darling

It was the peak of the 2014 fall auction season in New York, and though nearly two decades had gone by since Martin Kippenberger’s death of liver failure in 1997, the artist’s market had never been hotter. Prior to its bellwether postwar and contemporary evening sale, Christie’s had set the estimate for a prized 1988 […]

Beer with a Painter: Albert Oehlen

The long-reigning bad boy of German painting has consistently poked and prodded at whatever preciousness we associate with the medium. The long-reigning bad boy of German painting has consistently poked and prodded at whatever preciousness we associate with the medium. Early in his career, fueled by his association with Martin Kippenberger and other Junge Wildeartists, he […]

German contemporary art a big draw as artists come to terms with past

Sotheby’s says ‘unprecedented interest’ with buyers tuning in to postwar masters’ attempts to use work to confront history. For years, contemporary art sales at the world’s leading auction houses were dominated by the works of American and British artists. When it came to eye-watering amounts of money, paintings by anglophone figures including Andy Warhol, Jackson […]

Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on What Makes Painting an “Urgent” Medium Today

Painting has always served as a kind of laboratory for innovative ways of looking at the world, from the perspectival experiments of Alberti all the way to Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction,Minimalism, et cetera. Painters often saw themselves as an advance guard, pushing a kind of investigation forward in new terrain. Here, you’ve mentioned how in […]

Artist Imi Knoebel: ‘If you want to stay alive, you have to do something radical’

He kickstarted German punk, went on a mission to rescue Joseph Beuys and escaped the eastern bloc pursued by guard dogs. In a rare interview, one of Germany’s leading artists relives his extraordinary adventures. Imi Knoebel is surrounded by so many colours he has lost count. “I have 600, maybe 700,” he says. They hang […]

Top 10 Most Expensive Living German Artists – artnet News

In the second installment of our series of the world’s most expensive living artists, we focus on the Germans. Artists from the country have seen unprecedented success in recent years. And high-flying auction results have been spread relatively evenly across media, if not between the sexes. Perhaps most interestingly, however, all of the Germans in […]