Thaddaeus Ropac, the art dealer Joseph Beuys talked out of being an artist

Thaddaeus Ropac

Born	January 16, 1960 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee
Occupation	Art Dealer
Awards	Knight of the Legion of Honour

Every door of the business carries his name: a villa beside Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens, a converted ironworks on the north-eastern edge of Paris, a listed mansion in Mayfair, the Fort Hill building in Seoul and, since last autumn, the Palazzo Belgioioso in Milan. Thaddaeus Ropac built one of the very few European galleries that competes on the same floor as the American giants, and he built it without a financial backer. The gallery plainly works. What his career asks now is what a business tied so closely to one man’s eye and address book becomes once he stops walking its rooms.

The man behind those doors grew up far from any of them. Ropac was born in Klagenfurt, in Austria’s southernmost province of Carinthia, into a family with Carinthian-Slovene roots and, as he has described it, a home where the arts had no place. He trained as a retail salesman in Lienz, in East Tyrol, and spent time carving stone alongside the Carinthian sculptor Karl Prantl, convinced for a while that he would become an artist himself.

The turn came in Vienna in 1979, when he was nineteen, in front of Joseph Beuys’s installation Basisraum Nasse Wäsche. “I just couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he told W Magazine. He drove to Düsseldorf and talked his way into Beuys’s studio as an unpaid errand boy, planted trees for 7000 Eichen at Documenta 7 and worked on the Zeitgeist exhibition in Berlin in 1982. Beuys, by Ropac’s own account, talked him out of making art. What he gave him instead was a napkin with a note on it: “Dear Andy, please meet this talented young man. Joseph.” In New York that winter, Andy Warhol received him and introduced him to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The galleries began small and far from any market. A first space opened in Lienz in 1981. Two years later he opened a room in Salzburg’s Kaigasse, the date the gallery still gives as its founding. When Warhol visited in 1984 he was appalled, Ropac recalled in a 2009 interview with the Austrian news agency APA: the place was provincial, he could not afford proper frames and he sold almost nothing. The curator Norman Rosenthal later called Salzburg “the most unlikely place to open an avant-garde gallery” and added that Ropac “hit a goldmine.” The summer festival brought wealthy visitors to town, and Eliette von Karajan, the wife of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, took the young dealer under her wing. The gallery eventually moved into Villa Kast on Mirabellplatz, still its flagship.

In the late 1980s he had prepared a Basquiat solo show when the painter died suddenly in 1988; the exhibition became a posthumous one and sold poorly. Rather than ship the works back, Ropac borrowed money and took them all on himself, as the Seoul Economic Daily recounted in a 2022 profile. He compares signing an artist to a marriage, a decision to be made slowly, and Georg Baselitz has stayed with him for more than three and a half decades.

Paris came in 1990, with a gallery on rue Debelleyme in the Marais. In October 2012 he opened a second Paris space in Pantin, an early 20th-century ironworks refitted for work too large for any townhouse, inaugurated with Anselm Kiefer’s Die Ungeborenen and a room for Beuys. London followed in 2017 at Ely House, the former residence of the Bishops of Ely in Mayfair. In 2021 he opened his first Asian space in Seoul, at Fort Hill in Hannam-dong, with new Baselitz paintings under the title Hotel garni. Milan arrived on 20 September 2025, with Baselitz hung beside Lucio Fontana. The gallery now represents more than 70 artists, among them Kiefer, Alex Katz, Gilbert & George, Antony Gormley, Elizabeth Peyton and the Austrians Erwin Wurm and Arnulf Rainer. It employs around 150 people and stages more than 40 exhibitions a year.

The other half of the business runs on the dead. In April 2018 the gallery took on worldwide representation of the Beuys estate, closing the circle that began with the napkin. It also handles the foundations or estates of Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Donald Judd, Sturtevant and James Rosenquist. The London gallery alone reported a turnover of £41.9 million in 2021, a figure The Art Newspaper described as dwarfed by his business abroad.

The flattering version of this story, napkin included, leaves things out. Rosenthal credits the breakthrough as much to Eliette von Karajan’s introductions as to taste: the clientele came through Salzburg’s festival society before it came through the critics. The estates raise a different question. A gallery that sells Warhol, Rauschenberg and Beuys is managing reputations already made, and several of the names it shows most prominently belong to artists who can no longer object to how they are hung. Ropac himself has called the male-dominated exhibitions of the 1980s “astonishing and shameful,” a verdict that also covers the decade in which his own gallery was made. “A brand stands for something, and I am happy to become a brand, but it has its dangers,” he has said. In 2023 he told The Art Newspaper he had no succession plan; the most concrete answer so far to what outlasts him is a foundation registered in Austria to find a home for his private collection, possibly a museum.

This year the pace has not slowed. In March the gallery took on the trust of the late New York painter Martha Diamond, together with David Kordansky, with a first Paris presentation planned for 2027. In early October it announced that it now represents Denzil Forrester, the London painter of the dub and reggae clubs of the early 1980s. Two of his 2025 canvases, Professor Version and Yard, hang on the gallery’s booth at Frieze London from 14 to 18 October, ahead of a first solo show in London in June 2027.

In Paris he lives in an 18th-century building on the Seine facing the Louvre, in a flat whose previous owner, Tom Ford, offered it to him in the 1990s. A canvas painted jointly by Warhol and Basquiat hangs in his living room. France made him an Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2005 and a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2013; Austria awarded him its Decoration of Honour in Gold in 2006.

On 13 October he opens Baselitz’s The Heroes 1965–66 at Ely House, the series of ragged figures his longest-standing artist painted in his late twenties. The next test is quieter: whether a gallery built on personal trust can keep it once the notes are no longer in his hand.

Tags: art, artists, Andy Warhol, business, ceos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, contemporary art, Thaddaeus Ropac