The former assistant to Joseph Beuys’s assistant, a job he got by knocking on the great artist’s studio door, has since notched up 40 years as a gallerist. He celebrated – how else? – with a show of Beuys’s works on paper at his London gallery at the start of the year, and another at Ropac’s Seoul branch at the end of the year. Having opened in Salzburg in 1983, and adding two London and two Paris spaces along the way, Ropac landed in South Korea in 2021 and this year doubled the square meterage there by adding another floor, allowing for a simultaneous exhibition of Donald Judd’s sculptures and paintings in September. As well as some of the great American estates, Ropac has become the de facto rep for canonical artists of the German-speaking world, among them VALIE EXPORT, Anselm Kiefer, Not Vital and Imi Knoebel. Georg Baselitz turned eighty-five this year, so there were more celebrations to arrange, with shows staged by the painter at nine institutions around the world, including at London’s Serpentine galleries and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.