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.

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 award-winning 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.

The special field of art historian Uta Grosenick is contemporary art. After her studies, she has worked as curator at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and as curator at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. From 1999 on, she has edited numerous anthologies and monographs on art positions of the 20th and 21st century as well as books on contemporary art und individual artists at Taschen and DuMont publishing. Since 2010, Uta Grosenick has been the managing publisher at art publishing house DISTANZ in Berlin.

Rafael Arnold was born in Stuttgart in 1968. He pursued Jewish and Romance studies in Heidelberg, Rome and Madrid. He earned his PhD in Heidelberg in 2002. He worked as a professor in Paderborn from 2004 to 2010. Since 2010, he has been the chair of the Romance linguistics department at the University of Rostock.
Of his numerous publications, his translations and editions of the complete works of Luís de Camões (1524 to 1580), Portugal’s national poet, stand out in particular. Rafael Arnold is especially fascinated by his epic work The Lusiads, which celebrates the voyages of discovery by the Portuguese.

Minjung Kim was born in Korea in 1962. Her paintings demonstrate the luminous power of ink. They feature depths of space that are filled with a sense of wonder, and above all desire – desire for vastness. Minjung Kim sees the vastness in her watercolours as sonic space, and the contours of the hills, which grow ever fainter, as melody. Her watercolours are all similar but also quite different. They radiate a gentle calm, which is meant to be carried over to the observer, too. Minjung Kim removes contrasts without eliminating a sense of antagonism. This is what makes her work so unusual. We don’t simply stand in front of these watercolours and observe them; we are invited to experience them as reality and to become part of this reality ourselves. We almost become an observer within the painting. But, at the same time, the artist keeps us at a distance. We perceive the paintings with understanding and feel the calm as an extension of ourselves – wonderful patterns of light and shade in which anything goes, as long as the mystical calm remains undisturbed. Minjung Kim lives and works in southern France. Her paintings are exhibited in galleries and museums and at art fairs around the world.

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.

The elegant and striking photos of Sarah Moon (*1941, France), who lives in Paris, have been an integral part of the international fashion world since the 1970s. Her idiosyncratic work for designers such as Dior, Chanel and Cacharel has an irresistible magic.

Sarah Moon is a self-taught photographer who learned her craft while working as a haute couture model after completing her art studies. In 1968, she began working behind the camera instead, and found immediate success with her unmistakable photographic style: in the same year, she took part in a group exhibition on avant-garde fashion photography in the Parisian Galerie Delpire. This was to be the start of a unique career that would see Moon’s work appear in leading fashion magazines such as Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue.

Today, Sarah Moon is one of the world’s best-known fashion photographers and has applied her poetic, often dreamlike imagery to motifs outside the fashion world as well – including, since the 1990s, her film work.

Galerie Commeter first opened its doors on Johannisstrasse in October 1821, the first company of its kind in Hamburg. Its founders, Ernst Georg Harzen (1790 – 1862) and Matthias Commeter (1791 – 1869), were a major influence on artistic life in Hamburg until 1847. Even after its founders had departed, the gallery remained a key part of the Hamburg art scene and was taken over by Wilhelm Becker and Christian Meyer in 1847. They were followed in 1878 by Wilhelm Suhr, who moved the gallery to Hermannstrasse and led it into the nascent modern age. In 1908, under the management of Wilhelm Suhr Junior, the gallery moved to a new home, a magnificent art nouveau building where it remains to this day. Andreas Suhr briefly managed the gallery from 1952, and was succeeded in 1969 by his daughter Hella Suhr and her husband Bernd Sommer. Hella Suhr handed over the reins in 1997 – once again keeping it in the family – to Carola Persiehl, whose great-great-grandfather once took over Galerie Commeter. Carola is still running the business today and has placed the gallery at the heart of the modern art scene. From the outset, her gallery programme has been shaped by a certain philosophy: “If you want to recommend a picture, you have to fall in love with it”, she says of her work. Harzen and Commeter’s legacy is a love of art and a head for business, combining idealism and knowledge with a pragmatic acknowledgement that even the good, the true and the beautiful have their price. This legacy has been preserved through all the gallery’s ups and downs and forms a solid foundation for everything Galerie Commeter will help us to discover in the future.

Rupprecht Matthies, an artist born in Hamburg in 1959, studied under Gustav Kluge from 1982 to 1986 at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Rupprecht Matthies is multitalented and has long been known beyond his home city for sculptures and paintings as well as for mobiles and installations.

He particularly loves words and manuscripts, which he hangs from ceilings as mobiles or attaches to walls. His artworks, which are made from a range of materials, are usually displayed in unexpected places to encourage communication.

The artist has carried out public and social projects in Erlangen, Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich and the Netherlands. His works have been displayed in cities such as Goettingen, Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden and Bremen, as well as in Denver, Prague, Reykjavik, Mumbai, Pusan and Zurich. Publications such as embrace (2010), offen (2009), Mut (2006) and NA UND! (1999) contain the powerful voice of an artist whose compositions allow the reader to rediscover language and writing.