As the Ringier Collection takes over Germany’s Langen Foundation, the publisher ponders decades of curiosity, collaboration – and mixing business with pleasure

‘I gave up on asking myself why I have this drive to collect so many pieces of art,’ says Michael Ringier. Despite initially claiming ‘there is no real answer,’ when pressed, the chairman of Swiss media company Ringier – founded in 1833 by his family and now encompassing 140 brands in journalism, sports, and entertainment – points to his parents. ‘Both my wife and I grew up in households where our parents collected.’ While his were drawn to 18th-century furniture – ‘we had all the Louis at home, from XIII to XVI,’ he quips – hers favored contemporary art.

Early on, Ringier was drawn to Russian Constructivism, ‘probably because my father-in-law was a fur dealer and went to Russia twice a year,’ he muses. ‘Whenever I went to his home, I got a 30-minute lecture on Constructivist art. Then I was allowed to take my wife out.’ While Ringier ‘can’t stop collecting from this period,’ and keeps his works from the 1910s and 1920s safely stored in his library, over time his taste has veered toward the contemporary and the conceptual. ‘Looking into the past is very interesting, but I’m a journalist. I live in today’s environment, so I want to collect today’s art.’

Since founding the Ringier Collection in 1995, Ringier has grown to become one of Switzerland’s most significant collectors. The exhibition ‘Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound,’ on view from April 13 until October 5, 2025, at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany, features nearly 500 works from the collection – a small fraction of its 4,500-odd pieces – in a range of media, and dating from the 1960s to today, marks the collection’s 30-year anniversary. ‘There comes a moment in every collector’s life when they would love to do [something like this],’ says Ringier. Due to the collection’s size, he rarely sees such a large portion of it in one place. ‘When I entered the two big rooms [of the exhibition], I was totally overwhelmed. Here you have around 150 pieces in one room. You look at them completely differently.’

Surrounded by a tranquil pool, the Langen Foundation is a sculptural building composed of reinforced concrete, steel, and glass designed by Tadao Ando. ‘You can only do [an exhibition like this] in a private museum,’ Ringier muses. ‘If a public museum ran it, journalists might say that I was only trying to add more value to the work, or I could only do it if half of the collection was donated to the museum,’ he adds, emphasizing that’s not his intention. Instead, he’s committed to keeping the collection intact and closely tied to the Ringier company – a reflection of his original vision to integrate art into his employees’ everyday lives.

‘Whenever I went to see our offices, I thought, “How boring!”’ says Ringier, recalling his initial impressions of the family company’s workspaces. Knowing how profoundly art can shape perception, he began placing pieces throughout its offices. At first, he could tell that his employees were puzzled by the move. But, over time, their attitudes shifted. Once, when a piece was being rotated out, a wall at the company’s entrance remained empty for three days. ‘The concierge asked, “Mr. Ringier, you are going to place something else here, aren’t you?” You could see it was important to them.’

Now, art ‘belongs to the company’s spirit,’ and is not only displayed on office walls but, famously, infiltrates Ringier’s annual reports: Since 1997, renowned artists, from Sylvie Fleury to Michael Craig-Martin, have designed their pages. Some have even created unique artifacts to accompany their designs, such as Nicole Eisenman, who crafted a limited-edition bronze vase, titled Weed Holder, in 2022. This, along with other annual report commissions – such as Clegg & Guttmann’s The Owners (1997), a photograph of Ringier and his team members evoking old master portraiture – are on view at the Langen Foundation exhibition.

Ringier’s integration of art into commercial operations may seem unconventional, yet it stems from his belief that journalism and art are fundamentally linked. For him, both fields pose questions in the hope of finding fresh answers. ‘Maybe it’s an excuse, because you need a reason to justify the silly things you do,’ Ringier says, ‘but I think it’s a good one.’ In the beginning, this parallel drove his collecting decisions, and he focused on buying artworks that, like journalism, combined photography and text. ‘But, over time, you develop a red line. If you buy a Richard Prince, of course you want a Cindy Sherman. Then you might add an [Elaine] Sturtevant.’

Ringier developed his ‘red line’ in collaboration with Beatrix Ruf, who was the artistic director of his collection from 1995 to 2014. She curated the Langen Foundation exhibition alongside American post-conceptual artist Wade Guyton, whose work also features in the show. Ruf summarizes the collection’s throughline as a ‘commitment to engaging with artists in a deeper way than [that of an] accumulative way of collecting,’ emphasizing Ringier’s habit of acquiring extensive bodies of work, including early pieces in artists’ oeuvres.

Collecting early works can be risky: Still, Ringier’s openness to risk – and his willingness to acquire challenging pieces – is one of the reasons Ruf stayed in the role for 19 years. ‘There are a few works we would have loved to show [at the Langen Foundation] that are totally unexpected in a private collection,’ she says, citing as examples a massive piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija and the complete photographic works of Mike Kelley. Ringier’s curiosity toward art he didn’t understand also sustained their collaboration – ‘He would risk owning something before getting further answers [to his questions],’ says Ruf – along with his deep trust in and respect for the people he works with. ‘He’s very humble,’ adds Guyton. ‘Obviously, he makes decisions – he’s not hands-off in that way. But he’s incredibly open and generous. He invests a lot of money and time in different ways than other collectors.’

Some of that time is spent developing close relationships with the artists whose work he buys, which Ringier sees as a key advantage of investing in contemporary, over historical, art. ‘I can’t go and have dinner with [Kazimir] Malevich,’ he jokes. ‘Artists are intelligent. I [like] to talk to intelligent people.’ Getting artists’ perspectives on his collection, and hints about young talents that should be on his radar, is also something Ringier values. ‘One of the best was John Baldessari. Whenever we went to see him, he gave us a list of artists we should look at.’

What might the legacy of his art collection be? Ringier acknowledges its limits. ‘Every collection has huge gaps – there aren’t all these big names because they were already too expensive,’ he says. Still, Ringier believes it offers a compelling survey of the past 60 years of contemporary art. He hopes those who encounter it discover artists they aren’t yet familiar with, whose works ‘have the same quality as pieces by well-known artists.’ Another way Ringier works to secure the collection’s legacy is through frequent loans to public museums. ‘I’m curious to see how curators place the work… sometimes you get a completely new perspective [on it],’ he says, expressing how much he loved the 2023 Isa Genzken retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, which included several of his artworks. ‘Owning a piece of art is a responsibility,’ he states earnestly. ‘My responsibility is to make it as public as possible.’

‘Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound’ is on view at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany, until October 5, 2025.

– Emily May is a British-born, Berlin-based writer specializing in dance and performance. Published courtesy of Art Basel.