Searching as Passion – The Kringel Collection
The collection of the Rostock couple Drs. Ute and Ulf Kringel has grown over many years. Ulf Kringel’s passion for collecting intensified from 2016 onward, sparked by several spectacular discoveries made during his search for paintings from Mecklenburg and Silesia dating from before 1945. The starting point for this search lay in personal motives connected to his family roots in Silesia and his long-standing ties to Rostock, where he lives and works.
In the course of his research, Kringel encountered artworks of which he had previously been unaware. Among his most exciting discoveries are a multi-part Expressionist cycle on the Song of Songs by Egon Tschirch, created in 1923 and now held at the Rostock Museum, as well as the painting Winter Harbor in Althagen by Hans Emil Oberländer from 1939—both works long thought lost and forgotten for decades.
The resulting collection includes many such remarkable finds. Several dozen paintings, along with drawings and prints by artists of Expressionism, the Bauhaus, and New Objectivity, are represented in the Kringel Collection.
