Cologne Empties as German Art Scene Moves to Berlin

BERLIN — Cologne was the undisputed German contemporary art capital and market hub until the early 1990s. Not anymore. The art world is packing up and moving to Berlin.The annual Art Cologne, which opened yesterday, is struggling to compete with fairs in Berlin, London, and Miami. This is the last time the 40-year-old event will be held in the autumn: From next year, in a bid to win back international exhibitors, it will move to April. Cologne is also losing art galleries to the capital.“There is a movement toward Berlin,” said Alexander Hattwig, who mans Galerie Aurel Scheibler’s Berlin showroom, open since July 1 after the company shut down its Cologne gallery. “Our customers are international and they mostly prefer to come to the bubbling city of Berlin. It’s more on the European map.”While Cologne’s artistic life is dwindling, whole streets of Berlin are becoming art enclaves, often in the old no-man’s-land where the Berlin Wall stood. The Association of Berlin Galleries estimates there are 400 art galleries in the city, twice as many as 10 years ago. Cologne has about 100.About 6,000 artists, drawn from all over the world by cheap studio rents and a thriving creative scene, have made Berlin their home. Rents for top shop space in Cologne are $255 a square meter a month, compared with $230 in Berlin, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. research.Gerard Goodrow, the director of Art Cologne, which last year attracted 72,000 visitors, said the city remains an important center for art.“It has shifted a bit,” Mr. Goodrow said in an interview. “Berlin has a great advantage as the capital. There is a kind of snowball effect. Because it’s so cheap, more artists come, and then it becomes cool. But when it comes to the established art community, it is still based more in the Rhineland.”“We have the great collections here,” Mr. Goodrow said. “Berlin is younger, which is great, but makes it more volatile. We are more stable.”Cologne is still the city that established artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke call home. Yet a younger generation, including the Danish-born photographer Olafur Eliasson and the British artist Tacita Dean, are setting up studios in Berlin.Bettina Pousttchi, 35, for example — an artist who works with photography — left Cologne in 2005 after 10 years. Her work has been shown in museums in Amsterdam, Cologne, and New York, where she studied at the Whitney Museum.“Berlin is the most exciting place in the world for an artist to be,” she said over coffee at Galerie Buchmann, a gallery near Checkpoint Charlie that sells her work. “There’s a whole artistic community and intellectual exchange, which I missed in Cologne. It is very fertile creative ground.”Another draw for Berlin was the low real estate prices, after rent on her Cologne studio doubled in seven years. “Here I can afford a beautiful studio,” Ms. Pousttchi said.Berlin’s importance is reflected in the growing popularity of the 10-year-old contemporary fair Art Forum Berlin.

Cologne Empties as German Art Scene Moves to Berlin

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