Gallery
Galerie Thomas Zander 2017 © Candida Höfer, Cologne; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020
HISTORY
Galerie Thomas Zander was founded in Cologne in 1996.
In six to nine exhibitions per year, the gallery presents expanded photography as well as media and conceptual art. The gallery regularly participates in international art fairs such as Art Basel, FIAC Paris, Art Cologne, Paris Photo, and Photo London. Active co-operations are maintained with a number of institutions, museums and partner galleries. In 2012 the additional exhibition space Second Floor, located above the main gallery, was opened.
The gallery represents international artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. The gallery’s photography section, established since the very beginning, is the foundation of the program. It centres on artists considering their medium within the larger concerns of contemporary art, taking Walker Evans’ documentary style as a main reference point. The acclaimed photographers from the exhibition New Documents (MoMA, 1967), Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, as well as Robert Adams and Henry Wessel, representatives of the New Topographics movement, are at the core of the programme.
Mitch Epstein’s work, emerged in the New Color Photography of the 1970s, takes up this legacy, while the artist Max Regenberg is an outstanding representative of documentary portraiture in Germany. Gallery artists like Judith Joy Ross, Candida Höfer, Anthony Hernandez, and Tod Papageorge present further important positions in photography. Galerie Thomas Zander is particularly pleased to represent the Estate of Helen Levitt.
Lewis Baltz’s and Larry Sultan’s works bridge the gap between minimalist, conceptual art and photography in a unique and groundbreaking way. They embody the second focus of the gallery that lies on conceptual art involving extended photography and diverse media. This includes the work of Lothar Baumgarten, Victor Burgin, Peter Downsbrough, Dieter Meier, Don Dudley, John McLaughlin, Anthony McCall, and Günter Umberg as a contemporary position in painting as well as the Light and Space artists Peter Alexander and Robert Irwin. Their early work emerged in the 1960s and 70s and exerts a major influence on a younger generation of artists like Andrea Geyer, Molly Springfield and Joanna Piotrowska. These artists continue to engage in media reflexive aesthetics and politically relevant investigations.
In addition to the gallery exhibitions, the work of the gallery includes long-term consulting for collections, curating and arranging exhibitions in collaboration with international institutions as well as publishing monographs and catalogues.