Manuel Ludorff on His Family Gallery’s 50th Anniversary—and What’s In Store for the Next 50

Established in 1975 by Ranier Ludorff, Düsseldorf’s Galerie Ludorff has maintained a specialization in German Impressionism, Expressionism, and classic Modernism, and has maintained an ethos focused on the critical junctures of art history. Beyond its robust exhibition program, Galerie Ludorff has developed an international reputation through its rigorous fair participation—from Art Cologne to TEFAF Maastricht to the Armory Show in New York and beyond. Committed to the cultural landscape even beyond its own gallery space or booth walls, Galerie Ludorff has also consistently loaned works to important institutional exhibitions across the decades, such as “Making Van Gogh” (2019) at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and “Zero is infinity” (2020) at the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo.

This year marks the gallery’s 50th anniversary, and marking the occasion is the debut of the show “50 Years. Part I,” on view April 4–June 7, 2025. The gallery is a family affair: Ranier’s son Manuel Ludorff joined the business in 2009, and now helms the gallery as its director. On this momentous occasion, we reached out to Manuel to learn more about the gallery’s evolution since its founding, its most memorable moments, and, of course, what’s next.

In light of the gallery’s 50th anniversary, what are some of your reflections on art or the art world? Has your view on either changed significantly since you started out?

Our business is driven by three things: passion, curiosity, and personal growth—and this hasn’t changed at all over the years. It is amazing to see that if you approach the arts and the people involved with the right amount of curiosity, very interesting things will happen to and around you. You will end up meeting interesting people from all kinds of backgrounds, and their joint love for the arts functions as a link between them.

What has changed significantly is that many collectors don’t seem to have the patience and the time to go through such a transformative process, although their search for meaning is obvious and surely outgrowing decorative needs and any kind of investment purpose. To guide these clients is a challenging but rewarding area of the market that I enjoy a lot and see growing strongly in the future. At the same time, it is obvious that markets at large have changed the way we operate and the way information is distributed. We interact with many more clients and different experts in our growing international network. This is fascinating but it is challenging to keep focused on very individual and meaningful relationships at the same time.

Looking back, what are some of the most distinctive ways the gallery has evolved over the past decades?

The reach of a simple, tiny business like ours went from local to global very quickly, and this has changed almost everything regarding our operations.

Things have largely changed since we embraced the web in the late 1990s with me coding the first webpage of the gallery. I remember how we celebrated a single weekly request and how we raved about a little sale of a print every three months. There is a web developer now (thank God!) and one person is taking care of all the responses to the many requests that we receive daily now. Our goal is not to simply fill a digital shop, though. We interact with people, telling the story of our artworks and artists first. The questions that each client has vary and therefore it is difficult to outline the gold standard of a digital transaction. Many clients will eventually still want to see a work in the flesh if possible, but transactions to more remote destinations—recently to Hawaii and Australia for example—have proven that our analog products have a strongly growing and surprisingly healthy digital market.

Another driver of our business has been jumping over the pond almost 15 years ago. It was my clear goal to try new things and make changes from a strong business position rather than a weak one. Taking part in the Armory Show in New York with my father in the early 2010s was not the easiest of businesses but it gave us visibility in one of the prime international markets. Today we do more than 10% of our annual business in the U.S. Being invited to TEFAF certainly helped our business take another step forward. It was my father’s and my personal dream for a very long time. I will not forget the pride that we had taking part in this outstanding international fair for the first time.

A third driver of our business was the investment in people. I would not be half as successful without my team. We learn from each other every day and this spirit has made us grow up and prevented us from growing too old.

Installation view of the anniversary exhibition with works by Hans Arp, Willi Baumeister, Fritz Winter and Max Ernst. Courtesy of Galerie Ludorff.

Are there any moments across the gallery’s history that you are most proud of, or you consider the most memorable?

I feel very lucky for all the support of my family. My parents started the business with their personal collection of extremely beautiful prints and works on paper, mostly by German Expressionists. When they decided on Düsseldorf for the location of their business, they hardly knew anyone in the city. My father never worked in a gallery, he had almost zero contacts in the business. They had started collecting when they were students in late-1960s Berlin. My mother is a fashion designer and once they had finished their studies, they ran my grandparents’ fashion business together. Although it must have been a dream of my mother’s to work in her profession on that level, she realized one thing that was even greater than her love for fashion: Their shared love for the arts. After a few years in the fashion business and with my elder brother in the cradle, they invested all they had in new paintings and rented out a flat on the third floor of the Königsallee here in Düsseldorf.

I still have a lot of respect for their decision back then and I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor than my father. He taught me many things by doing and he gave me room to grow. Sounds simple but it is not. What I aim for is to keep that passionate spirit alive and to remain curious and brave.

Like my parents, I am most proud to see my three children grow, and even though they may decide for other professions in the future, I very much enjoy sharing some of our artworld moments with them. It was special to see my son Felix spend a week with me at Art Karlsruhe when he was nine years old and to witness how one week at this relatively busy fair has allowed him to grow tremendously. He ended up drawing his own works of art and selling them for five euros each. He eventually sold many more pictures than I did but what was most important was how he opened up to so many people that he had not known before and how he had touched so many grown-up people with his art. Spending a week with my teenage daughter Karla at the Armory Show in New York last year was special too. She was the one sleeping in the back room of our art fair stands as a baby and now she is almost grown up and helping us to build up the stand. She almost sold a picture on the opening day at the fair. Time flew by and it felt good to see that a third generation might be on its way.

Installation view of “Lotte Laserstein” (2023). Courtesy of Galerie Ludorff.

There are two exhibitions slated to coincide with the anniversary celebrations—can you tell us a bit about them, and why these shows were chosen for this specific moment?

We wanted to celebrate as many of the artists from our historic program as possible. I strongly believe that the great variety in our program and the strong quality of single art works is what makes us so successful. Many of the artists on show have helped build the foundation of our business and it is time to celebrate each one of them.

Part two of our anniversary exhibition will open coinciding with the actual anniversary celebrations in November, and I am very much looking forward to the many new works we will be showing in autumn. Some of them I already own but some of them I am still about to find out about. This is what makes this profession so special. You can of course plan things years ahead but finding an outstanding work of art is not a routine. Many surprises are found along the way and there is a unique story behind each object.

What has been the most challenging aspect of helming an art gallery? Anything you might do differently in retrospect?

I am trying to avoid these categories in thinking. I am proud of what we have achieved, and I wouldn’t know if we could have done any better otherwise. We have done many things right and we are one of the very few galleries that have successfully grown into a second-generation family business. Despite all the challenges of the recent past and a socio-economic situation which is far from easy, we are stronger than ever, and this is what makes everyone proud. It is certainly not a given, and you also cannot force it, but you can allow for success to come your way. I wouldn’t do much different.

View inside Galerie Ludorff showroom. Courtesy of Galerie Ludorff.

What’s next? Do you have any plans or aspirations for the gallery that you can share with us?

Major publications are on their way to mark this important anniversary. We will also grow the gallery’s exhibition space and its facilities by another flat of ca. 250 square meters this summer with a newly built photo studio and additional office, meeting, viewing, and storage spaces. What I am looking forward to mostly, though, is the outdoor patio connecting two spaces on our first floor, which will not only allow us to hold celebrations outdoors but to have a changing presentation of outdoor sculptures—a genre which I have been thinking to present for a long time now. Fifty years at Galerie Ludorff, there is a lot to celebrate but there still is a lot of energy and many more ideas to move forward!

Explore Galerie Ludorff here.