Katrin Bellinger began collecting in 1985 in parallel to her career as a dealer in Old Master drawings. Fascinated with the artistic process and the mystique surrounding it, she chose to focus on one theme: the artist at work. Since then the collection has expanded considerably and now includes over 1800 examples in a range of media – drawings, paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture – from the Renaissance to the present day. Among the artists represented are Marie-Gabrielle Capet, Honoré Daumier, James Ensor, Lucian Freud, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Angelica Kauffman, Käthe Kollwitz, Parmigianino, Rembrandt, Philipp Otto Runge, Georges Seurat, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Antoine Watteau. The collection is administered by the Tavolozza Foundation. To see more works on the theme of the artist at work, follow @the.artists.at.work on Instagram.

The Katrin Bellinger Collection lends works regularly to exhibitions held at museums and galleries world-wide.

Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints.

Comprising over 120 such works, Connecting Worlds. Artists & Travel (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 8 July – 8 October 2023)  was the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Select works by contemporary artists, including a piece by Langlands & Bell, offered further inspiring perspectives on the topic of travel and connectivity. The exhibition comprised of three sections “On the road”, “Destination Rome”, and “Dresden”.

This international exhibition project was a collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, and was made possible by the complementary strengths of the two collections: the Kupferstich-Kabinett, with its extensive holdings on the themes of travel and science in the early modern period, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, with its focus on representations of artists engaged in the creative process. The project was supplemented by prominent loans from national and international collections.

Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue in English published by Paul Holberton, London.

The exhibition and catalogue were co-curated and edited by Stephanie Buck, Director Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and Anita V. Sganzerla.

What do the rooms we inhabit say about us? Can they speak on our behalf after we’ve gone? And what happens when these private worlds are consciously captured by the inhabitant and displayed for others to see?

Curated by Langlands & Bell, ‘Absent Artists’ explored artists’ studios in which the artists themselves are conspicuously absent. Drawing primarily from the Katrin Bellinger Collection, the exhibition included works by Phyllida Barlow, Annie Leibovitz, David Hockney, Michael Craig-Martin, William Hogarth and James Ensor in a range of different mediums including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and print.

The exhibition drew parallels with Charleston, a private space which has been turned public in the absence of the artists who created it. It also considered the duality of Charleston as both a home and a canvas for artistic experimentation, with the works on show similarly blurring the line between life and art.

This trans-historical exhibition of drawings was devoted to the subject of the artist at work. Drawn principally from the Katrin Bellinger Collection, the display focused on depictions of artists’ studios, symbolic, actual and religious as well as depictions of self or others at work. Art historians have interpreted these themes variously as the means of elevating the social and economic status of artists; of illustrating the marriage of intellectual knowledge and practical skill proposed by academic theorists, or as sophisticated allegories of the philosophical significance of visual art. Even at the most pragmatic level of recording the clutter of the everyday studio, drawing human models or antique casts in an academy, or small figures sketching in landscape, works with these subjects are imbued with layers of meaning. This focused exhibition, spanning from the 16th to the 20th centuries, explored this rich subject matter through a carefully selected group of graphic works.

The exhibition was curated by Deanna Petherbridge, author of The Primacy of Drawing, in collaboration with Anita V. Sganzerla.

This two-venue exhibition explored the role of antique sculpture in artistic education and practice from the Renaissance through to the nineteenth century. It featured thirty-four drawings, paintings and prints from all periods and many national schools, selected from sources that include the Katrin Bellinger Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Teylers Museum, the Kunsthaus, Zurich, the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin, the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Gallery.

Among the themes addressed by the exhibition were the formal role of the Antique in the academic curriculum, the importance of the study of antique sculpture in educating young artists with the classical ideal, and the more intimate role played by incorporating antique sculpture within portraiture and artists’ self-portraiture. The exhibition included many celebrated images by Federico Zuccaro, Hendrick Goltzius, Michael Sweerts, Charles-Joseph Natoire and Henry Fuseli, as well as little-known and in some cases unpublished works by Peter Paul Rubens, Philippe Joseph Tassaert, Hubert Robert, William Chambers, Joseph Mallord William Turner and William Daniels.

The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue which provides an overview of this multifaceted subject in a series of synoptic essays, and which also presents new scholarship about many of the works on display. The exhibition and publication were co-curated and edited by Dr. Adriano Aymonino and Dr. Anne Varick Lauder.