Robert Grunenberg

Meet The Gallerist:

Robert Grunenberg

12 June 2026

Meet The Gallerist:

Robert Grunenberg

12 June 2026

Q: Your current exhibition “When Beginnings End” features Stefan Knauf, who has been with you since your first show. What does it mean to work with an artist over that many years?

A: This work is not about transactions. It is about the long game.

I first saw Stefan’s work at the UdK open studio in 2017. What struck me was that the sculpture he showed already contained many of the questions that still drive his practice today: material, time, ecology, the weight of civilization. Looking back, the continuity is remarkable.

Stefan, Sonja Yakovleva, Brandon Lipchik, Jan Zöller – they were all there in year one. They are still here. All of them have built real careers. Museum shows, public and private collections.

It is the privilege of witnessing that development over time. You show up, you stay, you grow together. That shared growth, watching each other become who we were supposed to be, is what keeps me going.

Q: Your debut brought together David Hockney, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, with Bret Easton Ellis and Norman Rosenthal contributing texts. How did you, as a newcomer, persuade figures of that magnitude?

A: I rang David Hockney’s doorbell in Los Angeles without an appointment, without knowing if he was home. He answered. We spent the whole day together, had dinner, and I interviewed him for four hours. That became part of the book.

But what actually opened those doors was the idea itself. The palm tree as a symbol of longing, paradise and Western projection. Hockney had painted them for decades. Ruscha had photographed them. Baldessari had used them. The project gave each of them a reason to participate that went beyond doing someone a favor.

When the idea is strong enough and you approach people with genuine curiosity, something opens. John Baldessari came through Marion Goodman. One yes led to another.

"The lesson is simple: ask. If the answer is no, ask again."

Q: Which artist has influenced and informed your vision the most?

A: “The art world loves a clean origin story. Mine is messier and more honest.

The first artist who shaped me was my father, who studied painting at the Städelschule. I grew up being carried on his arms in front of his canvases before I could speak. My mother was a musician, songwriter and poet. She also ran a café that attracted artists, musicians and all sorts of unconventional characters. Creativity was never something separate from everyday life. It was simply the atmosphere I grew up in.

My grandmother’s sister, Sister Maria Pientia Selhorst, was a missionary, artist and educator who spent most of her life in South Africa. She founded studios, taught generations of artists and worked across cultural boundaries at a time when that was an act of resistance. She shaped my father and through him she shaped me.

So my formation had nothing to do with institutions. It was physical, familial, almost pre-conscious. Michelangelo mattered to me, but so did Robert Musil. The visual and the literary, the sensory and the intellectual – that combination is still the engine of everything I do.

Q: Looking back at your own path, what do you wish someone had told you earlier? What advice would you pass on to emerging artists and curators?

A: Nobody told me how little correlation there can sometimes be between quality and visibility.

We have won the VBKI Prize, we exhibit internationally, and our artists are represented in museum collections. Yet recognition often moves more slowly than the work itself.

What I wish someone had understood earlier is that culture renews itself through disruption, not consensus. New voices rarely arrive through the front door. They emerge because somebody takes a risk on them.

But more practically: the setbacks are the education. Everything that almost broke me taught me more than any success ever did.

Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for the perfect conditions. Build it yourself and make it impossible to ignore.

Q: Berlin is dynamic and inspiring, but every creative journey has its challenges. What obstacles have you faced here, and how has the city shaped you?

A: Berlin gave me everything. The space, literal and metaphorical, to build something that would not have been possible anywhere else.

Where else could a drag artist from the Volksbühne and a collector from Charlottenburg stand in front of the same work and both be genuinely changed by it? That porousness, that refusal of fixed categories, is Berlin at its best.

The city also taught me patience. Things move slowly here in ways that can be frustrating. But that slowness has value. It allows ideas, relationships and artistic practices to develop over time. In a culture increasingly driven by speed and visibility, Berlin still leaves room for becoming.

Q: Which places in Berlin do you keep returning to?

A: “Schwarzes Café, right next to the gallery.

It has changed over the years, as everything in Berlin does and must. But it has changed the way a great city changes: slowly, with memory intact, without erasing what came before.

It is one of those rare places where history and the present exist in the same breath. Artists, students, collectors, tourists, insomniacs – they all pass through.

Perhaps that is also why I feel at home there. It reminds me, in some small way, of the café my mother once ran.