Gallery Portrait

Galerie Thomas Schulte

by Kito Nedo

No other Berlin gallery opens up to its urban surroundings as invitingly as Galerie Thomas Schulte. At the crossroads of Charlottenstraße and Leipziger Straße, near Checkpoint Charlie, the building attracts curious glances from passers-by with its brightly lit, floor-to-ceiling windows—especially during the darker times of the day and year. For an instant, exhibition and public spaces seem to merge almost seamlessly. The white cube’s hermetic tendencies are disrupted in a surprising and casual way. This is in keeping with the gallery’s mission, which values both artistic quality and public interaction.

As a programme-driven gallerist, Thomas Schulte champions conceptual artistic approaches. In his gallery, he presents artists who are internationally held in high esteem. These include the British abstract sculptor Richard Deacon, the Chilean installation artist Alfredo Jaar, and the American conceptual painter Pat Steir. For the past three decades, the gallery owner’s international ambitions have made him part of a small, pioneering generation of cultural entrepreneurs. Their continuous work over the years significantly contributed to the internationalization of Berlin’s art scene. Before coming to Berlin, Schulte lived in New York for several years, where he worked as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art and as the director of an established American gallery.

Schulte has been exhibiting art in Berlin-Mitte since 2006. Since 2024, a second exhibition space in the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Straße has complemented the gallery’s main location on Charlottenstraße. However, the gallery has its roots in Charlottenburg. Still under the name Franck & Schulte, the gallery opened its first exhibition on Mommsenstrasse in April 1991. It was a spectacular installation by the artist Rebecca Horn, titled Chor der Heuschrecken (Chorus of Locusts). The documenta artist’s work featured more than thirty clattering antique typewriters, which were electronically controlled and hung from the gallery’s ceiling. Even though around 5,000 art enthusiasts were eager to see it, starting a gallery was not an obvious move at the time. On the contrary. Due to the first Iraq war, the international art market had fallen into a severe crisis at the beginning of the nineties. Signs of recovery were slow. Yet, this did not dissuade the gallery owner. Exhibiting photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Katharina Sieverding, clock objects by Andrea Zittel, and art by Alighiero Boetti, Stephen Willats, and Gordon Matta-Clark, the gallery soon cemented its reputation as a place for internationally renowned contemporary art. To this day, Schulte has remained committed to this high-quality standard.