The story of Capitain Petzel begins in Cologne and New York as much as it does in Berlin, and it reads like a piece of recent art history. When Gisela Capitain met Martin Kippenberger in 1977, she moved in with the artist. Fascinated by the intensity of the artist’s life and work, Capitain immersed herself in West Berlin’s scene while keeping her day-job as a teacher—long before the city was considered cultural (or political) capital of Germany. Her engagement with contemporary art became an education in taste, arguably a significant characteristic in art dealers. Later, she would say, her main criterion for quality was artistic intelligence, which has to do with the way artists build their own world, she explains, weaving unspoken narratives into their works. The more multi-layered, the better.
When Kippenberger obtained a vast loft in Kreuzberg and started his now legendary office ”Büro” — a 1980s version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, sort of—Capitain managed the space. Her stint in Berlin lasted until she moved to Cologne in 1983. Although Capitain admits that she thought Cologne was ugly at first, she started her own gallery only a few years later, and it remains an important player in the West German and international market.
As if new galleries need established ones to grow out of—and they often do—Capitain’s assistant, Friedrich Petzel, eventually started his own gallery too. Petzel, who hails from Germany’s North and studied in Munich, established his business in New York in 1994, in SoHo, which would become one of the centers of the contemporary art world. Later, Petzel moved to Chelsea, then expanded to a town house on the Upper East Side.
Capitain and Petzel, now colleagues in two cities whose art scenes have a long-standing connection, remained friends, and in the 2008 they decided to open a space in Berlin. At the time, the city was just emerging as a cultural center out of the famously hedonistic 1990s. Young artists and curators founded institutions, as if they felt an urge to get serious. Since 2004, the city has its own biennial, and many dealers opened Berlin branches or started from scratch. They were ready to experiment, and the mythology around the German capital was powerful. Capitain and Petzel went their own way, however. Instead of creating a showroom or a project space, they decided to establish a third, independent gallery—Capitain Petzel was born.
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