Independent software for the artworld. Made in Berlin.

Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann, a software developer by training and at the time a gallery director, writes the first version of WrkLst to replace a gallery’s FileMaker database: one inventory, kept in sync between Europe and the USA.

Six years of daily use in Europe, in the USA and at art fairs worldwide: consignments, shipments, exhibitions, sales and presentations are added one by one, each built for the work at hand.

Tobias Vielmetter-Diekmann rebuilds WrkLst for the cloud, putting his studies in Art and Visual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on hold. Museum Studies and a practical semester at the New National Gallery Berlin shape how WrkLst records works and their history.

The art historian Laura Vielmetter-Diekmann shapes how the new WrkLst looks and works, over sixteen months of feedback sessions.

After six weeks of daily use at a gallery in the USA, WL Artworld Solutions is founded in Berlin in 2016, and WrkLst opens to galleries, artist studios and collections worldwide.

The first clients include Silberkuppe in Berlin and the studios of Nairy Baghramian and Danh Vo, which still run on WrkLst today.

Nairy Baghramian’s studio plans documenta 14, the 2019 Venice Biennale and her façade commission for the Metropolitan Museum with WrkLst; Danh Vo’s studio its Guggenheim survey and exhibitions at M+ in Hong Kong and the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

They become the first members of the WrkLst Advisory Board: people who use WrkLst every day advise where it goes next.

Charles Gaines joins the advisory board and records four decades of conceptual work in WrkLst; Vanessa Beecroft follows with her numbered performances since VB01 in 1993.

The galleries Anat Ebgi, Lars Friedrich and Aurel Scheibler join from the primary and the secondary market, with the artist Mieke Marple and collectors in Berlin and Los Angeles.

Work begins on the first websites that draw their content straight from WrkLst, with the strategist and digital product developer Konstantin Haubrok.

Functional development: Consignments with financial tracking and their own export; templates with several images; sortable Excel exports; a permanent, unique number for every work and contact.

The studio of Elfie Semotan joins the advisory board and moves its database to WrkLst ahead of her retrospective at C/O Berlin and the monograph from Hatje Cantz.

Functional development: Provenance; a captions-only user role; SEPA direct debit; the QuickBooks Online integration begins; proforma invoices for shipments.

Functional development: Video in outputs; placeholders in consignment terms; images in Excel exports; the first quick search that websites and other software can use; faster overviews.

After the MacArthur Fellowship and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the studio of Nicole Eisenman joins the advisory board and runs its inventory in WrkLst; so does the estate of the painter Kurt Kocherscheidt (1943 – 1992).

Functional development: Stripe card payments on invoices; exhibition copies in the edition editor; shipments linked inside exhibitions; download all images of a work.

Functional development: A complete export and import of all WrkLst data; external gallery sales and gift sales; outreach with work presets; pay links in sales templates; image credits per image.

Functional development: Invoices payable through Shopify; the sales report in Excel; art fairs in provenance; chronological sorting in every work list.

The company moves to Weydingerstraße 6 at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, one of Berlin’s established gallery quarters in Mitte.

Functional development: Edition captions; documents in presentations; date placeholders in consignments; Mailchimp unsubscribes; sales exports by year.

Functional development: The Lexware Office integration; the official release of the mobile app; external reference numbers on shipments, consignments and sales.

The company becomes WL Artworld Solutions GmbH through a capital contribution by its founder — no venture fund, no private-equity owner.

Functional development: A sale wizard from consignments; sales and consignments linked both ways; tags in Sales; the AI-assisted import.

WrkLst 10 rebuilds the interface from the ground up. Every change since is published at /whats-new.