Galerie Karsten Greve

During more than 40 successful years as an international art dealer Karsten Greve contributed significantly to the worldwide recognition of artists like Louise Bourgeois – as the first to exhibit her in Europe –, John Chamberlain, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni and Cy Twombly, two thirds of whose works in today´s market were sold by him initially. His intimate friendships with these artists provided the basis for his program, which is defined by the international avant-garde after 1945. Apart from Twombly, Kounellis, Chamberlain and Bourgeois, it has come to include artists like Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Louis Soutter and Wols.

In addition to these highly acclaimed artistic positions, the gallery also represents contemporary artists like Norbert Prangenberg, Paco Knöller and Leiko Ikemura, as well as photographers Sally Mann, Mimmo Jodice, Robert Polidori and Lynn Davis among others. The program is continuously expanded to include rising young artists like Georgia Russell, Claire Morgan, Gideon Rubin, Ding Yi, Raúl Illarramendi and Sergio Vega. Complementing the shows on a high quality level, bibliophile catalogue editions are released.

Karsten Greve, born in 1946, studied Law and Art History in Cologne, Lausanne and Geneva. As a student, he began to build his own art collection, acquiring his first painting by Cy Twombly in 1966. He started his career as an art dealer and publisher in 1969. By the age of 23 he had bought works by Twombly, Beuys, Fontana, Yves Klein, de Kooning, Cornell, and Kounellis. Together with Rolf Möllenhof, he directed the Möllenhof/Greve Galerie. In 1972, he became the sole proprietor of Galerie Karsten Greve in its original Cologne Lindenstraße location, debuting with an Yves Klein solo exhibition of his Anthropometry series. Karsten Greve opened a second space in Paris in 1989, a third location in Milan in 1994 (closed 2002) and another in St. Moritz in 1999.