Born in Munich in 1951, I enrolled in 1969 at the University of Munich to study jurisprudence. After five semesters, I moved on as a self-taught artist, who left for New York in 1973 for the first time. The arc that followed is best described in the fact that Dr. Armin Zweite, the then director of the Lenbachhaus Munich, first bought artwork by me for the permanent collection, later entrusted me as an independent curator with exhibitions for the museum that culminated in “Drawing Distinctions: American Drawings of the Seventies”, accompanied by Bruce Nauman’s “Floating Room”, 1972 and last not least acquired an artwork from the Alfred Kren Gallery for himself.
I sold artworks internationally to museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Boston Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung and the Lenbachhaus, all Munich, the Musée Barbier-Mueller, Geneva amongst others, to private collectors including the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, Joel Shapiro and Raimund Girke, to the art dealers Michael Werner, Matthew Marks, Ingrid Hutton, Fred Jahn, Thomas Borgmann, Herbert Meyer-Ellinger, Carles Taché, Helmut Klewan, Joost van den Bergh, and Marcel Nies and to the banks Deutsche Bank and HypoVereinsbank.
My wide range of connoisseurship and my international network of experts, combined with a fine eye for lasting quality, make me an ideal partner for collectors who want advice on the full range of global art. Especially younger collectors today feel more free to combine modern and contemporary art with pieces of tribal art, Old Masters, Antiquities and so forth. I am a long time champion of that context, as, amongst others, my exhibition (and small accompanying catalogue) "Atlas: World Cultures in Dialogue" at the HVB Kunst Palais, Munich (HypoVereinsbank) in 2005 attest.
At the same time, and with strict scrutiny regarding potential conflicts of interest, I am passionately working on my planned museum exhibition “The Decay of Beauty. The Beauty of Decay”, encompassing 5000 years of art.