Lisa Zeitz is editor-in-chief of Weltkunst and Kunst und Auktionen. After studying art history in Freiburg and Florence, she obtained her PhD in Munich with a thesis on Titian. She worked at AXA Art Insurance in New York, became the representative and CFO of Villa Grisebach Auctions, and later art market correspondent to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She published an awardwinning catalogue raisonne of Napoleonic medals together with her father, Joachim Zeitz, and wrote the biography of Werner Muensterberger (1913 to 2011) who was a collector of African art as well as a psychoanalyst specialising in collectors and forgers: “The Man with the Masks” (in German), Berlin Verlag, 2013. Lisa Zeitz lives in Berlin with her husband and three children.

Born in 1967, Thole Rotermund came into contact with Henri Nannen while still at school. Nannen, the celebrated German journalist and modern art collector who founded the Kunsthalle in Emden, sparked Rotermund’s love affair with classical modern art. This set him on his future career path and motivated him to move to Hamburg to study literature and art history. Study trips to San Francisco and Munich followed. He graduated with a master’s degree and worked on a number of freelance art projects. In 1997, he took up a post as an expert for modern art at the international auction house Villa Grisebach in Berlin. Three years later, he returned to Hamburg to set up a dealership, combining his enthusiasm for modern art with professional commitment. He started out as a specialist in classical modern works on paper and has since established his gallery – Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel – as one of Europe’s leading dealerships in modern art. It specialises in watercolours and drawings of early-20th-century artists: these include August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky and Lyonel Feininger, as well as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Christian Rohlfs and Emil Nolde. But also the abstract tendencies of early post-war art – for example, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Eduard Bargheer, etc. – are represented.

Besides classical art trade, Thole Rotermund offers highly professional advisory services designed to allow collectors to buy or sell artworks with confidence and discretion. Art-historical expertise, an eye for quality and close attention to detail are essential assets in helping to build up, manage and maintain collections, both private and public. Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel is represented on the major art fairs in Cologne, Munich, Hamburg and soon New York, and enjoys contacts with a strong network of international collectors and museum curators. In addition, Rotermund is member of the board of the Bundesverband deutscher Galerien und Kunsthändler (Association of German Galleries and Art Dealers).

Already since 2008, Rotermund is a regular guest at the Gallery on the seas on MS EUROPA where, in the context of exhibitions with a contemporary orientation, he deliberately sets an accent on classical modern art.

“You can look out for hours – yet the sea never looks back!”

Nothing less than the majesty of nature is the subject of Jochen Hein, born in Husum, Germany, in 1960. “Man’s desire to make contact with something greater than himself is the impetus for my paintings and the perpetual engine fuelling my art,” Hein says of his works, which show the landscape of his homeland. These studies of nature are not anachronistic, but timeless; their precision and brilliance are reminiscent of German Romantics and their atmospheric density have the effect of condensing the moment. Some of his paintings are scarcely bigger than a school exercise book, while others fill an entire museum wall. Yet whatever the format, they show the power, vastness and mystery of a nature, that can indeed touch and shape mankind, but can equally well get by without human beings.

Jochen Hein’s paintings depict a depth, a richness of details and structures whose quality goes beyond any technical reproduction. Hein’s motifs are collective archetypes – such as tree, grass, sea – which he transposes in an intricate painting process into thin skins of paint on compact, almost sculptural canvases. “The tension between the spatial effect of the paintings from a distance, and their banal, material nature when viewed up-close reflects the tension that lies between expectation and reality.”

Hein’s paintings are scintillating objects of great painterly charm and are simultaneously windows that open onto a nature which is both familiar and ineffable.

Axel Rüger was born in Dortmund in 1968. He studied art history in Berlin at the Freie Universitaet, at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and at Queen’s University, Kingston, in Canada. Rüger worked at a number of museums in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington before being appointed as curator of Dutch Pain-tings (1600 to 1800) at the National Gallery in London. During his time in London, Rüger curated international exhibitions such as Vermeer and the Delft School, Aelbert Cuyp and Masterpieces of Seventeenth Century Dutch Portrait Painting.

In April 2006, Axel Rüger became the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Under his leadership, a number of large-scale projects have been realised, such as the exhibitions Van Gogh and the colours of the night, Van Gogh at Work, Munch: Van Gogh, a large-scale research project on and complete new edition of Van Gogh’s letters, the re-display of the permanent collection and a new website as well as a new multimedia tour. In 2015, the museum also realised a new 20-million-euro expansion with a new main entrance. Under Rüger’s leadership, the museum has grown to 2.1 million annual visitors.

Rüger has published on 17th-century Dutch art. Now he lectures on the Van Gogh Museum and museological topics and appears regularly in the media.

When the art gallery Commeter was inaugurated at its initial address in Johannisstraße in October of 1821, it was the first enterprise of its kind in Hamburg. Until 1847, the founding fathers Ernst Georg Harzen (1790-1862) and Matthias Commeter (1791-1869) had a significant influence and impact on the domain of art in Hamburg. However, the gallery also remained an important institution of Hamburg’s art life after the founding period - in 1847, it was taken over by Wilhelm Becker and Christian Meyer. They were succeeded in 1878 by Wilhelm Suhr, who relocated the premises to Hermannstraße and successfully introduced the gallery to the dawning age of modernity. Under the management of Wilhelm Suhr junior, the gallery found a new home in a gorgeous art nouveau building in 1908, which is where it is still to be found today. For merely a brief period as of the year 1952, the gallery was managed by Andreas Suhr, whose daughter Hella Suhr ensued as his successor together with her husband Bernd Sommer in 1969. Hella Suhr passed on the managerial responsibility in 1997 – within the family, of course: Carola Persiehl, whose great-great-grandfather had taken over the art gallery Commerter back in his time, manages the business to the present day.
And with her, the gallery has arrived at the heart of contemporary art. Her programme is compiled on the basis of an attitude which has very much shaped the gallery since the beginning: “You need to fall in love with a painting if you want to recommend it“, says Carola Persiehl about her work. A love of art and business acumen, the combination of idealism and knowledge with the pragmatic maxim that the good, true and beautiful also comes at a price – this is the legacy of Harzen and Commeter. It has been preserved throughout the changing times of history and makes up the solid foundation for all the art objects we will also be able to discover at the gallery Commeter in the future.