BERLIN, GERMANY.- Berlin based Auction House Villa Grisebach will celebrate twenty years of successful business with a whole series of sales on December 1 and 2, 2006. The auction house was founded in 1986 trusting on the future development of Berlin. The payoff of this courageous undertaking has benefited the company and the city of Berlin. The German capital is on its way to becoming one of the major cities for international art, and within two decades, Villa Grisebach has turned into a successful and lively meeting place in Berlin for art lovers from all over the world. We have managed to assemble a highly skilled team of experts with a passion for art as well as profound knowledge. This team enables Villa Grisebach to work with the same professionalism as the staff of a fine art museum.

This fall, Villa Grisebach will celebrate its 20th Anniversary with six extraordinary auctions. The total of over 1,400 paintings, sculptures, drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs, will be the highest number of artworks ever offered at Villa Grisebach and amounts to a sales volume of € 18.5 million.

Among the highlights from ours sales are Modern Art masterpieces by Alexej von Jawlensky (Abstract Head: Gloaming, € 500,000), Lyonel Feininger (one of four paintings: High Houses IV, € 1,200,000), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (House in the Snow, € 500,000), Hermann Max Pechstein (Bathing Boys in the Surf, € 400,000), August Macke (Woman with Guitar, € 180,000), Karl Hofer (Pastorale, € 250,000), Henry Moore (Working Model for Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped, € 800,000), Pablo Picasso (Toréador, € 150,000), and Henri Matisse (Portrait d’une femme, € 90,000). The section of Contemporary Art will include important works by Gerhard Richter (Abstract Image, € 400,000), Franz Gertsch (two unique large scale paintings, € 30,000 and 40,000), and Matthias Weischer (The Bulgarian House, € 100,000).

A whole auction will be dedicated to the master of watercolors himself: Emil Nolde – Twenty Watercolors; and the special catalog for the Hopf Collection also promises to create a lot of attention showing a wide selection of very interesting re-discovered artists from the 1920s. The Photography Sale on November 30 will bring an excellent selection of old and new classics like Tina Modotti, Hans Bellmer, Martin Munkacsi, and Andreas Gursky to the market.

For twenty years, our core values have been not only Competence and Diligence, but also Trustworthiness, because our client’s trust is what helped turn a young idea in 1986 into a great auction house looking confidently into the future. The paintings from the sale Emil Nolde – Twenty Watercolors are exhibited at our headquarters in Berlin right now, while selected works from the auctions are touring Stuttgart, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Zurich, and Munich. All artworks from our sales will be on view in Berlin from November 25 – 29. To obtain more information or browse the catalogs, please visit www.villa-grisebach.de.