Photography Collection from Miami in Cologne

Lempertz is auctioning selected works from one of the world's most important collections: in autumn, outstanding photographs from the collection of Martin Z. Margulies will be offered at a special auction in Cologne.

Miami-based businessman and philanthropist Martin Z. Margulies is auctioning off around 300 works from his collection, choosing Lempertz in Cologne to conduct the auction. His collection is one of the most important of its kind worldwide: ARTnews Magazine has listed Margulies among the top 200 art collectors worldwide every year since the ranking was established, and the same magazine also listed him as one of the 25 most active photography collectors in the world in 2004.

His photography collection comprises more than 4,000 works of classical and contemporary photography from the 20th and 21st centuries and is housed, like his entire collection of contemporary visual art, in the famous warehouse in Miami's trendy Wynwood district, the city's young, hip art quarter. With its curatorial focus on the ‘human condition,’ the Margulies Collection reflects the historical and socio-cultural significance of the medium of photography.

The initial event that sparked Margulies' passion for photography was the purchase of a large-format C-print by Thomas Ruff from his portrait series. The full-format bust portrait of a young woman with the eyes of a sphinx, which hung in his private apartment for many years, fascinated the collector so much that it not only awakened his interest in the photography of the Düsseldorf School with its main protagonists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, but also for important trends in classical photography of the 1920s and 1930s in German-speaking countries, such as New Objectivity as its precursor and source of inspiration. His aesthetically trained eye led Margulies from Europe back to the United States, to Lewis Hine and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee, and ultimately to a broader view of the entire spectrum of 20th and 21st century photography. “It’s a collection of my external and internal experiences in my life,” as Martin Z. Margulies put it in ARTnews.

Jan Bykowski
Press and Public Relations
info@lempertz.com
Tel. 0221 925729 -57