Rudolf Zwirner: Give Me the Now

Rudolf Zwirner, born 1933, is an art dealer based in Cologne. He started his gallery in the 1960s and grew to show works by icons including Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and others. He is the father of the gallerist David Zwirner.

Nicola Kuhn is an art critic and a features editor of Tagesspiegel. She studied art history and modern history and has taught at the Free University and the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 2013, she was awarded the Critics’ Prize from the hbs Cultural Foundation, Hannover. In 2016, she coauthored the biography Hitler’s Kunsthandler: Hildebrand Gurlitt, 1895–1956. She became acquainted with Galerie Zwirner while studying in Cologne and met Rudolf Zwirner in her role as a journalist in Berlin.

Gérard Goodrow is a curator, an author, and a translator based in Cologne. He studied cultural anthropology and art history at Rutgers University, New Jersey; modern and contemporary art history at the City University of New York; and art history, German philology, and English literature at the University of Cologne. Goodrow immigrated to Germany in 1987. He has held positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Christie’s, London; and Art Cologne and Cologne Fine Art. Over the past thirty years, he has curated more than one hundred contemporary art and photography exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He is the author of numerous texts and publications, including Crossing China: The Land of the Rising Art Scene (2012) and Passages: Indian Art Today (2014), and has taught and lectured extensively on international modern and contempo- rary art, photography, and the global art market.

Lucas Zwirner is Senior Director, Sales, and Vice President, Business Development, at David Zwirner. In addition to establishing the ekphrasis series and spearheading the award-winning podcast Dialogues, Zwirner also helps lead select digital initiatives, including Platform, a standalone company founded in 2021. He is also a writer and translator, whose work has appeared in The Drift, The Paris Review, and An Elias Canetti Reader, edited by Joshua Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied comparative literature and philosophy.