Sagenhaft! 40 Jahre Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie

157 Merchant and Idealist In the past he has flirted with a relocation to Berlin, the native city of his his mother, Ruth Baumgarte, as Alex- ander Baumgarte confesses. But his location in Biele- feld has convinced him over the years: “Bielefeld lies very centrally in the middle of Germany. At the center of a branching star, you are quickly everywhere. And since our network of contacts that has grown over decades makes me independent, I can operate very well in the tranquil atmosphere that is off the beaten track of the big cities.” Instead of Berlin, Baumgarte has decided on the city in which Ruth Baumgarte, after the war and her first marriage, found her new homeland including an international recognition as a painter, especially for the Africa cycles with their socio-critical pictorial world of an almost intoxicating color intensity. “But she was not only an excellent painter, but also as a mentor. From my earliest childhood I was occupied with art and grew up with her artistic doctrine. She had an infallible sense for people and for quality and was herself a strong personality and revolutionary woman who had operated her first gallery with great enthusiasm for ten long years.” When in 1986 she handed the reins to her son, Al- exanger Baumgarte extended the gallery business to include a kind of consultant firm, at the time one of the first in Germany. […] “Over the past years we have experienced a new tech- nization of art and the rise of new art sites in Asia, India and Africa, which are crowding into the market.” A development that the Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie is involved in at eye level equality. But to be able to recognize the artistic and cultural game plays in the worldwide melting pot of originalities, there must be a concentrated recourse to our roots, to the essential, as Baumgarte sees it. Thus since 2012 he has also been the chairman of the new Ruth Baumgarte Foun- dation and annually administers an award for young promising talents in the field of figuration, a heartfelt wish of the artist who died in 2013. The entrepreneur Alexander Baumgarte has internalized the personal credo of his mother and mentor: “Art is more than an investment, It must address the heart and the soul.”

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