Tobias R. Brill

Born in Timisoara, Romania, I came to Germany with my parents at the age of 2. A wonderful childhood with my family and some animals followed. I attended a Waldorf school until the eighth grade, where during the preparation of my final thesis (life and work of Michael Jackson) on a trip to California I realized that there is “more”. Many travels around the world with my parents encouraged me  and so I changed schools and lived in the Czech town of Hluboka in South Bohemia for a few years, where I attended an English-language international school with my sister. There I found friends from all over the world and my love for soccer. After that, there was a period in Oxford where I studied business. Then I no longer wanted to learn in theory, but wanted to “do it” and earn money with it.

From my time in the Czech Republic, I had a good friend from Iran. He had inspired me at that time for the topic of the valuable Oriental carpets and my parents had then provided me with wonderful rooms for a first sales exhibition. It was a great success and the carpets became a permanent exhibition.

So I started to organize my first exhibitions. I then moved to this friend in Malta for half a year and organized further exhibitions from there, among others with the ceramic artist Anna Boria from the “Mecca of ceramics” Caltagirone in Sicily.

A little later I met a wonderful person from Munich and he told me about the paintings he had been doing for years. It had not yet occurred to him to present them to the public. I was thrilled by these paintings created with incredible perfection and encouraged him to exhibit them with me in the Phönix Gallery. Robert Kachel agreed – and already on the evening of the vernissage many pictures were sold. For him and for me a very nice experience. You just have to dare to do something . . .
So the pictures also came to me as an exhibition theme.

In 2016, I participated in a world-renowned fair in Abu Dhabi, the Big Boys Toys exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre. There I met another German exhibitor who had a booth right next to us with his company Luxury Elements. He was exhibiting iPhones with beautiful engraved designs on the gold-plated back. That immediately excited me and so the theme of the next exhibition in the Phönix Gallery was born. My clients were as excited as I was.

So, apart from the exhibitions in my own Phoenix Gallery, I have exhibited in a few other places: in Munich, at Chiemsee, in Tutzing, in Abu Dhabi and at the Fine Art & Antiques Fair at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London. Apart from silk carpets and paintings, the themes have included jewelry and precious minerals, fantastically designed handmade knives made with the most precious materials, the ceramics of Anna Boria from Caltagirone in Sicily and and and . . .

Since I love to cook and love to serve cocktails with it, I undertook several months of training as a bartender in New York. After successfully completing the training, I travelled across the U.S. together with a friend by car to California, where I met my parents and flew back to Germany with them after a joint trip through California. The experiences from this trip also flowed into the ideas for further exhibitions.

Since my childhood, I knew an artist from Senegal, a friend of my parents. He is very well known in Europe and Africa as an artiste painter who paints exclusively with his fingers, Mamadou Diakhaté from Senegal. I already designed two also very successful exhibitions with him, one at Chiemsee in 2017 and another in 2020 in the Phoenix Gallery in Grügelborn.

Today I am 25 years old and excited about what life has in store for me …