Galerie Thomas Zander was founded in Cologne in 1996. In five exhibitions per year, the gallery presents media/conceptual art and expanded photography. The gallery regularly participates in international art fairs like Art Basel, Arco Madrid, Art Brussels, Art Cologne, Art Forum Berlin and FIAC Paris. Active cooperations with a number of institutions, museums and partner galleries are maintained.
The gallery represents international artists from different generations who consider the medium of photography within the larger concerns of contemporary art. Walker Evans and Eugène Atget, classic photographers of a documentary style, function as conceptual reference points for the gallery programme. The acclaimed artists from the exhibition New Documents (MoMA, 1967), Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand have been part of the gallery programme from the very beginning. Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel are major representatives of the New Topographics movement, which put landscape photography back on the agenda of contemporary art. Mitch Epstein and Joel Meyerowitz stand for the New Color Photography of the late 1960s and 70s. The artist couple Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer as well as Jean-Paul Deridder and Max Regenberg are important positions of contemporary documentary photography.
A major focus of the programme lies on conceptual artists working in different media: Lothar Baumgarten, Victor Burgin, Anthony McCall and Larry Sultan. Their early work emerged in the 1970s and they are a major influence on young artists like Andrea Geyer, Martin Dörbaum and Trevor Paglen who continue to engage in the aesthetic developments of conceptual, media reflexive positions.
In addition to the gallery exhibitions, the work of the gallery includes long term consulting for collections, curating and organising exhibitions in collaboration with international institutions and museums as well as publishing monographs and catalogues.
