Around 550 works from the inventory of Galerie Michael Schultz, whose owner died last month, will be auctioned by the Cologne company Van Ham on behalf of the insolvency administrator in June.
Berlin-based Schultz was arrested in 2019 on suspicion he cheated customers out of millions of euros. The prosecutor was preparing a case against him when he died, age 70, on 28 December after a brief illness. His gallery was declared insolvent in 2019.
Works by the German artists A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler) and Cornelia Schleime, and the Korean artist SEO (Seo Soo-Kyoung) are among those to be offered for sale but a Van Ham spokeswoman says further details are not yet available. Schultz, whose focus was on contemporary art from Europe, the US and Asia, “showed time and again that he had a good instinct for trends on the art market,” the auction house said in a statement.