Take a rare chance to see the astonishing Ringier Collection of artworks in Düsseldorf

Enter the Langen Foundation, the low-lying Tadao Ando-designed space located in the green Neuss cultural district outside Düsseldorf, and you will be blown away by a show of the rarely seen Ringier Collection. An astonishing 500 works, spanning sketches to vast oils and photographic works, from artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, John Baldessari and Sylvie Fleury, are on display in a mind-boggling reveal. The private collection is owned by Swiss publishing mogul Michael Ringier, who started his collecting habit in earnest 30 years ago.

Entitled ‘Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound’, the exhibition explores the boundaries of artistic media, the artifice of art, and perception – subjects that have fascinated Ringier since he and his wife first started investing in Russian Constructivist art.

‘The works on paper were really quite affordable back then,’ he smiles. As his fortunes amassed, so too did his ambitions to build a peerless collection of work that dates from the 1960s to the present day. To that end, he has worked with curator, Beatrix Ruf for over 20 years. She teamed up with American artist Wade Guyton to mastermind this show. It was some task – Ringier’s full collection comprises 5,000 works.

‘An exhibition is in the life of every collector and this is a very special place to show it. Usually, when viewing works of art, you have five, six, seven in one room and that's it. Here you have, I don't know, 150 in one room and that changes everything,’ says Ringier of the accumulation. The works are positioned in vitrines and on podiums, and reach from floor to ceiling in Ando’s stacked pavilion galleries with smooth-as-silk concrete walls.

Ruf and Guyton (Ringier has been collecting the latter's work since 2006) took a deep dive into the collection, part of which is on display in Ringier’s homes and throughout his company HQ. ‘We wanted to create a show in the Wunderkammer tradition. Before the 20th century, oil paintings, relics, ceramics, objects were treated as equal, and we also wanted the works to be in dialogue with one another,’ Ruf explains.

The exhibition moves through works on paper (Sarah Lucas with Rodney Graham and Jim Shaw; George Condo with Seth Price) flanked by Lee Friedlander’s haunting black-and-white photographic works, and shifts into bigger-scale works by Thomas Ruff, Alighiero Boetti, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. One is not quite sure where to land one’s eyes, and discombobulation is the point.

As a publisher and former journalist, Ringier’s fascination is with Western artists who question and satirise methods of communication and tropes of image-making, whether that be Prince’s appropriation of advertising imagery (Marlboro Cowboys and Brooke Shields), Guyton’s terrific giant facsimiles of found book pages, or Sherman’s autobiographical enquiry into identity and style. ‘What's truth? What is real? This has always been an important question, but today, it is No. 1,’ says the sprightly 76-year-old Ringier, referencing the inflation of information, false news, and AI. The Ringier Group, where he serves as chairman of the board of directors, still employs 2,000 journalists across magazines and newspapers, but 80 per cent of the business is now the development of tech-driven marketplace platforms.

‘It shows you also how great an artist is if someone was already asking these questions 30 years ago. Time is absolutely essential for art because here are decades-old works and they look fresh: they answer very actual questions or they are asking questions and that makes great art,’ Ringier says.

The subterranean gallery spaces are hung with an explosion of works: Wolfgang Tillmans segues to Albert Oehlen to Paul Thek, Georg Herold onto Karen Kilimnik, Urs Fischer and Laura Owens in mediums that range from monumental abstracts to post-modern collage and faux naive. The final gallery sees a splurge of sculptures and objects, with over 36 works from Peter Doig’s StudioFilmClub hung high like a frieze. At floor level, find Guyton’s appropriated Mies Van der Rohe chairs (from the Enron HQ), alongside Fischli/ Weiss black rubberised artefacts, Rosemarie Trockel’s ceramics and Valentin Carron’s refurbished Piaggio Ciao moped.

Collecting on this scale has to be an obsession and what Ringier and Ruf have committed to is buying deep into every artist’s collection. ‘There's not one artist where we don't have early career works. But of course, you cannot afford to have everything you want. Every collector is “missing” something and that’s the destiny,’ he says. And the collection is ever-evolving, being hung and re-hung around private homes, the Ringier company HQ and out on loan to institutions and museums around the world. Ringier was subversive in his ‘office art’ mission. ‘The idea was to sneak art into the daily life of our people just by being there – it’s not just a Sunday excursion,’ he asserts. Every year, he commissions an artist for the annual report, resulting in some strange and obscure artefacts.

Right now, Ringier is thrilled to be giving his collection an airing. ‘I'm extremely happy about all the people visiting the place and enjoying it or not enjoying it, whatever. But at the end it's for me!’ he says.

‘Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound’, Ringier Collection 1995-2025 at the Langen Foundation, Neuss until October 5, 2025, langenfoundation.de