500 Ringier Collection artworks in rare show: review

Enter the Langen Foundation, the low-lying Tadao Ando-designed space located in the green Neuss cultural district outside Düsseldorf, and you will be blown away by a show of the rarely seen Ringier Collection. An astonishing 500 works, spanning sketches to vast oils and photographic works, from artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, John Baldessari and Sylvie Fleury, are on display in a mind-boggling reveal. The private collection is owned by Swiss publishing mogul Michael Ringier, who started his collecting habit in earnest 30 years ago.

Entitled ‘Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound’, the exhibition explores the boundaries of artistic media, the artifice of art, and perception – subjects that have fascinated Ringier since he and his wife first started investing in Russian Constructivist art.

‘The works on paper were really quite affordable back then,’ he smiles. As his fortunes amassed, so too did his ambitions to build a peerless collection of work that dates from the 1960s to the present day. To that end, he has worked with curator, Beatrix Ruf for over 20 years. She teamed up with American artist Wade Guyton to mastermind this show. It was some task – Ringier’s full collection comprises 5,000 works.

‘An exhibition is in the life of every collector and this is a very special place to show it. Usually, when viewing works of art, you have five, six, seven in one room and that’s it. Here you have, I don’t know, 150 in one room and that changes everything,’ says Ringier of the accumulation. The works are positioned in vitrines and on podiums, and reach from floor to ceiling in Ando’s stacked pavilion galleries with smooth-as-silk concrete walls.