Gallery Portrait
Barbara Thumm

Barbara Thumm studied Fine Arts in London and was part of the Young British Artists’ movement. At the end of the 1990s, she relocated to Berlin. The German capital was enticing with its free spaces, finding itself in the process of becoming a new art hub. Thumm wanted to link the British and German art scenes, organize exhibitions, and create a place that was run by artists for artists. Today, we can still discern the spirit of those years in the activities of her gallery.

Thumm got into the gallery business once she arrived in Berlin. She started as a partner in the Gebauer and Thumm Gallery, but shortly afterwards decided to focus on her own programme. In 1997, she founded the Barbara Thumm Gallery. It was initially located on Auguststraße, later on Dircksenstraße, and subsequently on Markgrafenstraße—where it is still based today. Fiona Banner, Fernando Bryce, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, and Martin Dammann are some of the early artists who are still represented by the gallery. They attest to the long-standing and close collaboration that Thumm develops with artists. From the very beginning, the gallery has also been a space for dialogue: a place where networks are created and exchanges take place. Collaborative work with curators and international institutions is an essential part of the work, making evident Thumm’s openness to new formats. Particularly in its early years, the gallery organized exhibitions in off-spaces in Berlin—such as the video exhibition No Vacancies! in an empty house in Berlin-Mitte, which she curated alongside Angelika Richter, the current chancellor of the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.

To this day, Barbara Thumm has been instrumental in promoting and advancing the careers of several artists. Her achievements include establishing the figurative late work of Jo Baer, who had only been known for her 1960s and 1970s minimalist works, especially in the USA. She also played a significant role in the international success of Peruvian and feminist conceptual artist Teresa Burga, whom Thumm discovered in her 2011 solo exhibition at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The gallery also enabled the reappraisal of Burga’s works from the 1960s and 1970s. In Berlin, Barbara Thumm commissioned an extensive restoration of the works from this creative period, thus revealing the pop and bold colors that had been missing from the works for a long time. The gallery is currently the sole representative of the estate of the artist, who died in 2021. Since 2010, it has also been in charge of another important estate—that of the German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann. The ensemble Künstler sein, which the artist showed at Documenta 6 in 1977, was reexhibited for the first time at Barbara Thumm in 2010. Since then, the gallery has continuously developed methods of restoring and re-enacting complex installations from Oppermann’s Ensemble Art.