The Company

Weng Fine Art - The Company behind Weng Art Invest

Weng Fine Art AG (WFA), founded in 1994 by Rüdiger K. Weng, is one of Europe’s most successful and profitable art trading companies. Headquartered in Monheim am Rhein, Germany, the company was founded in 1994 by Rüdiger K. Weng and it is currently (since 2012) the only publicly listed art trading company in Europe since 2012.

The team is serving clients worldwide with a team of financial, art and digital experts, with almost thirty years of experience in the art and finance markets.

WFA is the perfect back bone for Weng Art Invest. With its high capital shareholder equity with nine German and international banks and a founder who is a former stock trader, make WFA a driving force behind the platform’s foundation.

WFA holds an extensive inventory of Modern and Contemporary Art by more than 400 international artists. Its primary sales channels include international dealers and auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, and the Dorotheum. The company uses proprietary valuation models, which combine art-historical aspects with financial expertise, allowing an unbiased view of art as a commodity.

WFA is the majority owner of its Swiss subsidiary ArtXX AG (see below). Established in 2014, it has a focus on the scalable digital trade of limited art editions. This segment of the art market was identified as having the most growth potential.

WFA is also the largest shareholder of Artnet AG (New York/London/Berlin), the preeminent online resource for art research established in 1989. Its price database encompasses information from over 1,600 auction houses and 300,000 artists, with data archives dating back to 1985, making it the most important dataset in the worldwide art market. WFA sees significant potential for scaling its business in the coming years by enhancing its products with the valuable data sets from Artnet.

In addition to Artnet, WFA is also a significant investor in ArtFacts, which has been collecting, processing, and analysing primary market data on the global art market since 2001. ArtFacts uses this data to provide collectors, artists, gallerists, and educators with valuable insights, trends, and analysis of the ever-changing art world landscape. WFA views this investment as an opportunity to take advantage of the growing demand for data in the rapidly digitising market.

ArtXX (Weng Contemporary)

In 2014, Weng Fine Art AG established ArtXX AG as a subsidiary in the Swiss Silicon Valley Zug to focus on the global art edition business and increase scalability. ArtXX is using “Weng Contemporary” as a brand for its limited edition business.

The company has been dealing in fine art editions by famous contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Robert Longo, Ai Weiwei and Erwin Wurm. With a focus on artistic quality, creative technologies, authenticity and original condition, Weng Contemporary’s long-standing partnerships with artists, publishers, galleries and manufacturers ensure a high-end art collecting experience.

ArtXX also aims to offer prime art editions that hold and expand their investment capital and can function as an asset class. Leveraging their experience and knowledge in the limited art edition and financial markets, ArtXX developed a platform where investing in art is as simple as buying shares: Weng Art Invest.

Weng Art Invest

Weng Art Invest is a second brand of ArtXX AG, the Zug (Switzerland) based subsidiary of Weng Fine Art AG. Its focus is to merge the art and financial markets by offering limited editions from world renowned artists as a valuable investment opportunity. Through the company’s trading platform, clients can purchase a carefully curated selection of limited editions and manage their art assets including tracking their value development, buying, holding, and selling. Furthermore, as users acquire ownership of the artworks, each asset in their portfolio can be redeemed and shipped to the desired location. The platform aims to highlight the future possibility of trading art as any other asset class, such as securities or real estate.

Weng Art Invest’s platform is using a using cutting-edge technology. By tokenizing physical artworks it creates a unique digital twin (“token”) for each asset. When an artwork is bought, the token is moved from the seller’s inventory to a trust wallet created for the customer. When the customer decides to redeem or sell the artwork, the token is returned to the seller’s wallet. In the beginning, this technology will only be used for the platform’s internal and technical management. However, it sets the groundwork for future platform expansion, including peer-to-peer trading. The ultimate goal is to develop a platform that offers tokenized artwork for trading and enables investors to exchange tokens and trade with one another on different marketplaces by connecting their own wallets.

The platform is easy to use – even for people that have never been in touch with blockchain technology and also don’t have their own wallet.

Our Founder

Rüdiger K. Weng is the founder and CEO of Weng Fine Art AG, as well as the President of the Board of ArtXX AG.

A trained banker, Rüdiger K. Weng embarked on his entrepreneurial journey, cutting short his studies of economics in Cologne. After working in stock trading at Dresdner Bank, he was active as a dealer and auctioneer of antique stock certificates. He continues to engage in this activity to date and has accumulated the world’s most significant private collection in this field, the “Collection Commodore.” Furthermore, he served as an advisor and analyst for a trustee of bankruptcies and as an advisor to the Ministry of Culture in Abu Dhabi.

Since the 1980s, Rüdiger K. Weng has been a passionate art collector and began his professional career in the art market in 1994. He merged his two core interests, art and financial markets, by taking Weng Fine Art public in 2012. In 2014, he set up WFA Online AG (now ArtXX AG), which includes Weng Contemporary, a prominent online sales platform for high-quality art editions. Since 2020, he has expanded the business’s scope towards the tokenization of art. Today, Weng Fine Art AG is the only publicly listed art trading company worldwide.

As Founder, Board Member, and Majority Shareholder, Rüdiger K. Weng draws from his extensive experience in the sale of over 22,000 artworks, combined with profound knowledge of art, history, business, finance, legal, and tax matters. He considers himself “entrepreneur by passion” and one of “the last surviving generalists.“