Gallery

She introduced the world on this side of the Iron Curtain to the eastern European avant-garde: Antonina Gmurzynska, who was born in Warsaw in 1923. She had grown up in a cultured family. Like her mother before her, she studied art history and then worked in a Polish museum. In 1964, chance saw to it that Antonina Gmurzynska, her husband, and her daughter were all abroad, independently of one another. "My mother was with relatives in Denmark, and my stepfather at a medical congress in Sweden. I was then thirteen years old, attending a French boarding school," the daughter, Krystyna, tells us.

"A Modern Gallery" : Profile by Christian von Faber-Castell for Finanz und Wirtschaft, the leading Swiss Financial newspaper.

Since joining Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne 10 years ago, Mathias Rastorfer has helped propel the gallery into the elite circle of international players capable of competing with the major auction houses for top material. Now, as gallery director and co-owner-with Krystyna Gmurzynska, Rastorfer is responsible for mounting well-documented, museum-quality exhibitions devoted to specialized fields (such as the Russian avant-garde), or to a single artist in collaboration with the artist's estate (such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay and Yves Klein).