More beautiful than a stock market list from the bank

Collecting was in Swiss publisher Michael Ringier's blood from birth, but not collecting contemporary art. Growing up in a culturally rich environment, his parents' passions were 18th-century French furniture and Meissen porcelain, of which they amassed a magnificent collection. Through his wife, Michael Ringier discovered the art of the Russian Constructivists at a young age and from then on moved steadily along the timeline toward the present.

In the early 1990s, his wife asked the heretical question: “Where are we going to hang all this stuff?” This did not lead to self-restraint, but rather to an expansion of the collection, which now also included the publishing house run by Ringier. As this required professional, systematic expertise, Michael Ringier commissioned curator Beatrix Ruf to look after the collection in 1995. The focus was now placed on younger art, with the idea of accompanying the artists throughout their careers. The museum sought to acquire as many works as possible by artists it considered particularly important.

Looking back, Michael Ringier described his development from enthusiast to collector in an interview as follows: “The more I thought about it, the more I said to myself: Actually, art and journalism go together wonderfully. For me, they are related: both are about society and the description of that society, about problems that need to be solved and questions that need to be answered.”

Over the decades, an impressive collection of contemporary art has been assembled in this way, now comprising around 5,000 works. Only small parts of this collection have been on display so far, for example at the publishing house's headquarters in Zurich or in Ringier's villa on Lake Zurich. The collection does not have its own art gallery or even its own museum. This makes it all the more gratifying that it is now being presented on a larger scale – in the Rhineland, at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, under the title “Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound. Ringier Collection 1995–2025.”

The Langen Foundation, a temporary collector's museum that opened in 2004 on the site of the former Hombroich missile station, is ideally suited for such a comprehensive inventory. It allows the two curators, Beatrix Ruf and artist Wade Guyton, maximum freedom in selecting and presenting the treasures of the collection. They make extensive use of this and display several groups of works, for example by Peter Doig, Fischli/Weiss, Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, Seth Price, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, and Rosemarie Trockel, which testify to Ringier's idea of continuous support or “collecting in depth.” The tour through the spacious rooms of the Tadao Ando building is so densely filled with works in places that the absence of supplementary wall information seems almost obvious. Instead, a free booklet provides orientation.

It is striking how important photography and text-based works are in the Ringier Collection, alongside the classic categories of representational painting and sculpture (including a captivating glass work by Isa Genzken). An exceptional work (“Examining Pictures”) by the US conceptual artist John Baldessari, who died in 2020, is on display, and the big names in contemporary photographic art, Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, and Wolfgang Tillmans, are also represented with large-scale motifs.

But photographic miniatures, such as those by Lee Friedlander or Mike Kelley, have also found their place in the collection. On the ground floor, a tiny photograph by Trisha Donnelly even occupies a room all to itself, offering a welcome respite from the explosive diversity of works surrounding it.

For art enthusiast and publisher Michael Ringier, who has his company's annual reports designed by artists (thus creating his own unique art form), his passion has paid off. The value of the collection has multiplied thanks to the tremendous boom in the art market. A few years ago, in an interview, he described his art purchases as “one of the most profitable investments Ringier has ever made” in the long term. At the same time, the continuing rise in prices is making it difficult to continue collecting at the usual high level. Nevertheless, he has no intention of stopping, as he revealed in a comment at the opening: “I think it's nicer to see it here on the wall than to get a stock list from the bank.”ot applicable.