Galerie Thomas Zander was founded in Cologne in 1996. In six to nine exhibitions per year, the gallery presents expanded photography as well as media and conceptual art. The gallery regularly participates in international art fairs such as Art Basel, FIAC Paris, Art Brussels, Art Cologne, Paris Photo, and Photo London. Active cooperations are maintained with a number of institutions, museums and partner galleries.

The gallery represents international artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. The gallery’s photography section, established since the very beginning, is the foundation of the program. It centres on artists considering their medium within the larger concerns of contemporary art, taking Walker Evans’s documentary style as a main reference point. The acclaimed photographers from the exhibition New Documents (MoMA, 1967), Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, as well as Henry Wessel and Robert Adams, representatives of the New Topographics movement, are at the core of the program. Mitch Epstein’s work, emerged in the New Color Photography of the 1970s, takes up this legacy, while the artists Jean-Paul Deridder and Max Regenberg are outstanding representatives of documentary portraiture in Germany.

Lewis Baltz’s and Larry Sultan’s works bridge the gap between minimalist, conceptual art and photography in a unique and groundbreaking way. They embody the second focus of the gallery that lies on conceptual art involving extended photography and diverse media. This includes the work of Lothar Baumgarten, Victor Burgin, Peter Downsbrough, Dieter Meier, Don Dudley, John McLaughlin, Anthony McCall, and Günter Umberg as a contemporary position in painting as well as the light and space artist Robert Irwin. Their early work emerged in the 1960s and 70s and exerts a major influence on a younger generation of artists like Andrea Geyer and Molly Springfield, who most recently joined the gallery program. These artists continue to engage in media reflexive aesthetics and politically relevant investigations.