Where to buy art in Germany, and when to commission a painting

Germany buys art through two worlds that rarely meet: some 700 professional galleries, most of them small businesses selling more than 60% of their work to private buyers, and a décor trade that sells printed and hand-painted canvases in the sizes and colours it stocks. Kunstvereine, academies, art consultancies and thousands of painters fill the space between.

Choose by the wall first and the seller second: a print for the kitchen of a rented flat is a shop purchase; a canvas the height of an Altbau salon, or six paintings for one villa, is not. The wider picture is in our Germany wall art guide.

Germany’s art year runs to a steady rhythm, open to anyone who walks in, starting with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter both taught.

Take the wall with you: its width, its height and a photograph let you judge on the spot whether a work will hold it.

Most German galleries are small, personal businesses, representing some 14,600 artists between them. In Berlin, prices follow a convention that a city art magazine sets out plainly: height plus width, times a factor for the artist that rises with exhibitions, museum purchases and prizes. So size is what costs most at a gallery, and a canvas the width of a villa wall soon becomes a collector’s purchase.

What a gallery gives you is the artist, and Germany has a strong figurative line, from the Neue Leipziger Schule of Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy to this year’s graduates; ask whether the artist takes commissions. To train your eye first, the Boros Collection fills a bunker in Berlin-Mitte and is seen by guided tour, and Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt towers, one artist to a floor, run guided tours every month. A sound plan is often both: a gallery work for the wall that matters most, and the walls around it painted to order in colours that answer it.

The Kunstvereine, member-run art associations found in most German cities, sell Jahresgaben each winter: editions and small unique works by artists they have shown, most of them objects and works on paper rather than canvases. You usually join before you buy: the Kunstverein München sold its 2025 editions on site on one evening in late November, then online to members. Academy Rundgang shows, open studios and Berlin’s flea markets are the other doors, and a German design magazine’s advice still holds: better to invest in one original than to buy many cheap copies.

These routes reward time and a good eye. For a stair hall, a wall above a 2.8 m sofa or a whole flat to furnish before moving day, look to galleries, commissions and canvases made to order.

German home stores and online décor shops describe their wall art generously. ‘XXL’ means 120 × 80 cm at one large online department store and 200 × 100 cm at a canvas-print shop. ‘Handgemalt’ (hand-painted) and ‘Unikat’ (one of a kind) sit on canvases sold next to prints, and one well-known décor shop explains that its catalogue works are painted in small editions, with no change of size or colour. Stocked hand-painted canvases thin out above 150 × 100 cm, and that shop’s commission service stops at about 2 × 1.5 metres.

That range suits a standard sofa wall. The rooms Germany’s design press photographs look different: of the nine living rooms in AD Germany’s 2026 round-up, only one names a print. To check what you are buying, ask for a side-lit photograph of the surface, where brush and knife marks throw small shadows, and a photograph of the work in progress. With iHomeArt nothing is printed: you see your own canvas at every stage, and a side-lit photograph of the texture whenever you ask. See our textured paintings.

Germany has no shortage of painters who take commissions: more than 64,000 self-employed visual artists belong to the Künstlersozialkasse, the artists’ social fund. A painter gives you their own hand and often a studio visit; expect weeks or months, usually against a deposit. Agree in writing how you will see the work in progress, because a painting made to your specification is usually not returnable.

A made-to-order studio such as iHomeArt answers a different brief: a design from some 1,300 catalogue works, or one designed for your project, painted to your wall and your colours, alone or as a set in one hand. Send a photograph of the wall with its width and ceiling height; your quote usually arrives within one business day. You approve every stage in photographs or video and the finished canvas before it ships, which is why finished pieces are not returnable. Specifying for clients? See art for interior designers.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.