Volker Diehl

Volker Diehl (born 28 May 1957 in Neheim-Hüsten) is a German gallery owner. He mainly exhibits contemporary art in the gallery "DIEHL" (Berlin).
Biography and career.
After graduating from high school in Warstein in 1977, Volker Diehl first studied at the Kunstakademie Münster under Hans-Jürgen Breuste, and from 1978 art history at the Free University of Berlin. In West Berlin, he supported various artists as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (including Markus Raetz, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, Dieter Hacker) and got to know René Block in this context. At the exhibition "Für Augen und Ohren" curated by Block, which was first shown at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and then at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, he was also responsible for the support of artists and thus got to know Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Joe Jones, and many other artists. A little later he became assistant to Shigeko Kubota and ran her studio. From 1981 to 1983 he was assistant to Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal. In this context, he supported the artists and worked as personal assistant in the exhibition "Zeitgeist" (1982), which was "arguably one of the most historically significant global painting surveys of the 20th century". Together with Roland Hagenberg, he subsequently published the two books "Maler in Berlin" (1982) and the sequel "... Und" (1983) in their own publishing house "HAPPY-HAPPY", which contained numerous interviews and portraits of artists and collectors, among them Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Erich Marx as well as representatives of the art groups "Neue Wilde" and "Arte Cifra". With Roland Hagenberg he traveled New York City, where they conducted interviews with Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Robert Morris, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, Mary Boone, Tony Shafrazi, and many more. The tapes used turned out later to be defective, so the interviews were never published.
Activities as gallery owner.
In 1983 he began to curate exhibitions at the "Galerie Folker Skulima" in Berlin as a junior partner and showed young, contemporary artists including Jaume Plensa, Rosemarie Trockel, Leiko Ikemura, Sergey Volkov, Ray Smith and Martin Assig. In September 1990 he took over the rooms at Niebuhrstr. 2 with the founding of "Galerie Volker Diehl". In 2000 he moved to new rooms at Zimmerstr. in Berlin-Mitte, in 2007 to Lindenstraße in the Kreuzberg district. In autumn 2011 the gallery moved back to the former space at Niebuhrstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In September 2013, a project space was added under the name "Diehl Cube" in Emser Straße in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, in which exhibitions were shown until 2018.
In addition, Diehl was the first western gallery owner to open its own exhibition space in Moscow under the name "Diehl + Gallery One" in April 2008. In the former premises of the state Soviet art trade at Smolenskaja No. 5/13, Diehl exhibited the works of the American artist Jenny Holzer under the title "Like truth" as the first project from April 17 to June 15, 2008. After other exhibitions by Wim Delvoye, Zhang Huan, Jaume Plensa and Olga Chernysheva, the Moscow branch closed again at the end of 2009.
Under the name "Diehl Projects" Diehl was responsible for further projects, first around 2000 and 2007/2008 in Berlin, later for the exhibition of the Russian artist Olga Chernysheva "Adventure Istiklal N. 9" in the "Yapi Kredi Kazim Taskent Art Gallery" in Istanbul (2009) and two group exhibitions in Rostov-on-Don with the titles "Berlin tut gut!" and "Pubblico – Privato" (spring 2012).
Other projects.
In 1996 he and 13 other gallery owners were founding members of the art fair "art forum berlin" and, together with Rudolf Kicken, also managed the business of the company until 2001. It was internationally the first exclusively contemporary art fair and the first fair in the world to be conceived and conducted by gallery owners.
With Margarita Pushkina and Vlad Ovcharenko, he established the Russian art fair "Cosmoscow" in 2010 with an "all-inclusive concept". In 2016, together with Elena Sereda and Natalia Chagoubatova, he also founded the London pop-up company "Art Circle" (curation by Bettina Ruhrberg, among others).