Exhibition and Atelier Opening “unpacked”

In 1998, Andi Goral rented an artist studio from a friend in the former Cologne Hagen battery factory. Then a dramatic situation occurred. In the room on the other side of the hallway, a fire broke out, and the works of his artist friend were completely destroyed. Goral's paintings remained unscathed, but the building section on Rolshover Straße in Cologne-Humboldt-Gremberg was no longer usable.

The draftsman and painter packed up his colors, oils, brushes, pigments, and paintings. In a hall of the shipping company Ilies Transport on Remscheider Straße in Cologne-Kalk, he rented a wooden crate and stored the paintings and his studio equipment. Meanwhile, the shipping company transported the wooden box with the paintings to a gigantic warehouse in Cologne-Porz. The paintings – which had been kept in absolute darkness for two decades – moved on a sunny day from the Cologne wooden box to Neuheilenbach in the Eifel. Since 2025, 7 years after the move, Andi Goral has been painting and drawing in his new studio and unpacking.

Andi Goral studied Communication Design with a focus on drawing, painting, and printmaking at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg under Prof. Georg Bernhard. As a freelance draftsman and painter, he maintained a studio in Munich-Haidhausen. This was followed by study visits to Southern Europe and several group and solo exhibitions. In the early 1990s, he moved to Cologne. In Cologne-Mülheim and Kalk, he painted in a shop and exhibited. As a draftsman, art director, and calligrapher, he designed for the Foreign Office, institutions and authorities, publishers such as Handelsblatt, or DAX companies. His drawings were published by regional and national newspapers and magazines. Goral’s designs and drawings have won several awards. With the founding of his own digital publishing house and one of Germany’s first local online newspapers in Cologne, his field of activity expanded to include journalism. Since 2025, Goral has been working as a draftsman, painter, calligrapher, publicist, and printmaker in his studio in the Eifel.