Konrad Fischer opened his first gallery in Düsseldorf in 1967, initially under the name Konrad Lueg (his birth name; he later changed it to Fischer). The gallery occupied a central position in the Düsseldorf Academy milieu: it showed Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys, and the early German Conceptualists alongside the Capitalist Realists. Where Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne built the Neo-Expressionist infrastructure, Fischer in Düsseldorf built the parallel infrastructure of cool distance, photo-mechanical mediation, and conceptual rigor.
Fischer’s role in the Neo-Expressionist story is not as dealer but as boundary marker. The same artists who passed through Werner’s roster — Baselitz, Lüpertz, Kiefer — were contemporaries of Fischer’s program. The two galleries defined a split temperament within the same generation: Werner’s painters chose vehemence and monumentality; Fischer’s chose irony and mechanical reproduction. When Polke’s later large paintings abandoned the small-format parody of the 1960s for enormous scale and chaotic figuration, the two programs almost converged — but the temperamental gap remained.
The gallery later opened a London branch and continued to represent major contemporary figures. Its archive is a record of the road not taken by the Neo-Expressionists: the path of Capitalist Realism and Conceptualism that ran parallel to Baselitz’s scene.
See also
- capitalist-realism — the movement Fischer championed
- galerie-michael-werner — the Cologne counterpart
- Anselm Kiefer — the Beuys student who chose Werner, not Fischer
- adjacent-aesthetics — for the named transfer between these programs