New York’s Petzel Gallery, the hundred-year-old seven-storey building, was the home of the renowned Studio Instrument Rentals where musical acts ranging from the Grateful Dead to 50 Cent once rehearsed until last year. The place was recently acquired and renovated by the Feil Organization.
The Gallery is leaving the 456 West Eighteenth Street digs it has occupied since 2012 and moving north to 520-530 West Twenty-Fifth Street. The new space comprises three floors in addition to a rooftop sculpture garden and will additionally host a more robust version of the bookstore Petzel once operated out of a retrofitted loading dock on Eighteenth Street.
The gallery has a lease spanning over 15 years. The new place includes 11,000 square feet of ground-floor gallery space as well as 7,000 square feet of office space. “I’d wanted to buy a building, or have a lease of twenty years or longer,” gallery owner Friedrich Petzel. “I needed a long-term commitment because we plan shows two or three years in advance.”
In committing to Chelsea, Petzel, founded in 1994 on Wooster Street in Soho, is bucking a recent trend that has seen a number of New York galleries relocate to the city’s Tribeca neighborhood. “As long as the conditions provided for my artists to do the best they can, I didn’t care what New York neighborhood space was in. There was nothing on the market that compared to this,” said Friedrich Petzel, who cited the flexibility of the space as one of its most attractive qualities, given the gallery’s embrace of artists with multivalent practices and its own role in the community. “Galleries these days are becoming like institutions, with things like outdoor sculpture gardens,” he noted. “In the old days, galleries didn’t do that. We show performances. We have bookstores, we publish. We have a lecture series, which we want to do more thoroughly in the new space.”
The gallery is expected to move into the new space in April 2022. It will continue to operate its Upper East Side outpost in a townhouse at 35 East Sixty-Seventh Street.