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Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan

February 13, 2025

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Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan - Features - Independent Art Fair

Elizabeth Dee, Alexander Shulan, Friedrich Petzel, and Meredith Rosen; photography by Alice Proujansky

On January 29th, during a lively evening at Petzel Gallery in New York, a cross-generational panel of leading gallerists pulled back the curtain on what it means to be an art dealer today. In conversation with Independent’s founder Elizabeth Dee, Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan spoke candidly about the evolving relationship between artists, galleries, and collectors in the rapidly shifting 21st-century marketplace. Surrounded by Nicola Tyson’s paintings, the panel reflected on the patience required to nurture artists’ careers, the challenges of navigating market upheavals, and the delicate business of building trust with a new generation of collectors. Their discussion, which has been edited below for brevity and clarity, offers a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the pressures and possibilities shaping the New York art world.

Elizabeth Dee: My question to everyone to begin is, what makes a good art dealer today? I'm a retired art dealer, so I can start by saying, I think for me it was being immune to rejection, but I think it's different for everyone and it's different depending on what generation you come up. 

Alexander Shulan: I guess I would say having an intuition for what kind of images people will respond to and what creatively would be a positive contribution to the landscape.

Meredith Rosen: I think being able to make it not about you and being selfless. The thing I see with a lot of other art dealers is you really can't breathe without doing it.

Friedrich Petzel: I think patience is important because we deal with highly eccentric human beings who have a particular vision and you have to somehow complement that vision and turn it into reality. 

Elizabeth Dee: It sounds like we're talking about a lot of evergreen things that were true then and now, right? But a lot has changed in terms of art dealing, particularly in recent years. We're all different generations and I think we've witnessed different sets of priorities that have shifted. We are in Nicola Tyson's phenomenal show, Friedrich, and patience I think is one of the core tenets of the relationship with the artist. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what it means to develop a show like this. What does it mean to bring some of those qualities forward and how does that reflect what you think art dealing is, versus how people might perceive it to be on the outside?

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan - Features - Independent Art Fair

Friedrich Petzel, photography by Alice Proujansky

Friedrich Petzel: I saw the work in 1991 or ’92 when Nicola had a loft in Soho on Broadway and she showed exclusively women artists [in a project space] called Trial Balloon. I was introduced to her by another English friend of mine. And I remember vividly walking into the space and I felt deeply excluded from that experience being a white hetero German guy. I experienced paintings that were so foreign to me that it kept me engaged. I actually ended up trying to buy a painting. I followed [her] career when at that time it was virtually impossible for women to be part of that painting conversation. At some point Metro [Pictures] said, well, we might take her on or you make a decision, do you want to own your own gallery? With my 20 bucks, I didn't know how to do that. But what I'm trying to say with all of this is Nicola was not an artist I particularly understood. It was more like a foreign experience, and it became the springboard for me to make up my mind about what I wanted to do with my life.

Elizabeth Dee: You were at Metro Pictures as a director, so this was really early days. I want to delve into that a little bit. It's like recognition of something that challenges you is, I think, really fundamental to your mindset and what made you set out to become a dealer originally. How many shows have you and Nicola done at this point?

Friedrich Petzel: I don’t know, 12 maybe.

Elizabeth Dee: That's significant. Alex, what do you think? Do you feel like when you're addressing your relationship with artists and artists' work, especially when you're thinking about representation, do you need to feel that challenge? Is it always necessary?

Alexander Shulan: I don't think I've had many easy relationships with artists. I think that there's always a kind of conflict by virtue of being a dealer. You exist in a kind of liminal state between being a creative individual and a businessman, a facilitator. Also you exist in an uneasy relationship with capital where your job is to distribute objects to a class of people that often artists are not from. I feel like navigating that is always a very complicated part of art dealing and it does result in a kind of internal conflict in the creative machinations of exhibition production, which I think is in and of itself productive. That's like the tale as old as time in terms of modern art dealing.

Elizabeth Dee: Meredith, that speaks to something you brought up, which is this kind of absence of presence and working behind all of this, in this uncomfortable space that's also stimulating.

Meredith Rosen: Yeah, I find my most important role when working with artists is that I'm giving them this platform and I need to be there. Making great art is painful and it's scary and it's very vulnerable and my number one job is to make them feel it's okay. We don't know what the world's going to say, but I am there and I believe, no matter what happens.

Elizabeth Dee: Great. And I don't think many people outside of the art dealing community understand this. Friedrich, you had some thoughts around that, like the discomfort in taking a leap of faith, and then putting yourself in a position to be this conduit, as Alex was saying, and then also being, for lack of a better word, selfless in the endeavor to a certain extent. Or not really having a sense of where things are ultimately going to go. I'm sure when you started working with Nicola, you had no idea you'd be on your 12th show right now.

Friedrich Petzel: Well, not only that. I mean, yeah, we did a lot of exhibitions, but then there also comes a time where there's the career ascent, when all of a sudden everybody wants to buy that particular painting or the museums start to come in and so on. I was terrified that Anthony d’Offay would steal my young artist from me. Anthony was like the Larry Gagosian of his time in England. In fact, it became a very good collaboration with him and then years go by and the first museum shows come around, the first books are being published. But with any career, the patience part is that it doesn't always go up… So the dealer needs to be there for a long period of time, not just, hey, we can sell everything now and then walk away. You have got to build a career. And that is, I think, one of the keys. Honestly, not that many things have changed. I truly believe that this is still what we do. We continue to work with artists that we believe in and stick it through sometimes years that are less successful.

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan - Features - Independent Art Fair

Photography by Alice Proujansky

Elizabeth Dee: Meredith, do you think art dealing has changed for you over time, since you started?

Meredith Rosen: I think with the access of information, it moves faster. There's a bigger industry, there's more people in it. So it's a little bit less insular in a way, but the core of it is what it's been through our history. It's still what Leo Castelli used to do. I'm doing the same thing that Marian Goodman used to do. It's one of the only industries that there are certain aspects you can't replace. You have to see a painting in person. I wouldn't show a painting I didn't see in person because it might look different, and that part of it is very special. 

Elizabeth Dee: Alex, do you agree?

Alexander Shulan: I've had my gallery now for nine years. I started with very little resources and very low overheads and the exhibitions were quite low stakes insofar as there weren't large amounts of capital being spent by collectors, myself or the artists. In the last few years, there's been an enormous amount of upheaval in the emerging art market, which has been something young dealers don't want to talk about. After Covid you saw this huge injection of capital into emerging art, often without very clear intuition and by agents who didn't really know what they were doing, which then resulted in the spiking prices of young artists, the rapid expansion of galleries who are showing emerging artists, and then the last year and a half of rapid contraction in that market. It has put extreme stress on young galleries and young artists across the board. [Galleries] have less clients, there's less resources available to them even in terms of the community. But then there's the same appetite for art, the same number of artists that want to be involved, and I think the same social desire for it. 

So that's been a landmark change in the emerging art landscape, which has been under-discussed by virtue of the fact that to discuss it appears weak as a dealer or weak as an artist. But it's really an endemic issue that's still occurring at this moment. That necessitates ingenuity from artists and from dealers and also a different negotiation with a collector class. It has created a more difficult condition for me as a dealer, but in many ways it's been super productive for me.

Elizabeth Dee: We’ve talked about working with artists and those evergreen things that have not changed, but Friedrich, I know you and I have been through the 2001 recession, the 2008 recession. This is not exactly a recession. This is a different kind of animal. It's more of a contraction and I think we're reaching the bitter end of that now after 18 months. How does that cycle work, both in terms of your perspective running the gallery and also in terms of managing expectations with artists? I know that's a big part of this with pricing and other things too. 

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan - Features - Independent Art Fair

Alexander Shulan, photography by Alice Proujansky

Friedrich Petzel: I think we have to pay attention a little bit more. Certainly to our artists, but also to what the market looks like. We have to rebuild trust that things don't necessarily always fly off the wall by themselves and, honestly, I enjoy this. It is not that I'm suffering from this kind of contraction. I think given my background, I can contribute a little bit more to this equation now than I could have five years ago.

Elizabeth Dee: There is an opportunity right now, because we have finished a cycle. We had Covid, we had this opportunity to dominate people's attention for two years, maybe even three. Collectors really developed during that time because it was the one thing they could work on during lockdown and not travel as much. That attention economy has shifted and now we're paying for a lot of the things that we benefited from during that cycle. I think the contraction shows that. With the shifts that are happening in the world, the backdrop politically, the economic readiness for things to move in the art market, is there a way for us to reinstall trust? Is there an opportunity for dealers to take control of this conversation again? Is there a way to reimagine how we operate with artists and with collectors now? To work from a position of strength rather than, oh, this is the time to economically recover. I feel like there are dealers, present company excluded, who are just looking to satisfy existing tastes, and that's something people have come to rely on. I think that there's an opportunity to take some of that back and maybe trust can be formed that way. Alex, do you have some thoughts on that?

Alexander Shulan: I have a couple of comments, but first I guess it's funny to talk about recession in the art world as an emotional or socially important issue. To me it really isn't. Promoting the economic conditions of art dealing is very low on my order of concerns except insofar as it affects my day-to-day life and my ability to run my job. So it seems that this is a hyper-specific condition local to one community. That being said, when we're talking about trust, for me as a dealer, my job is to be suspicious of other agents in the art market who are not the artists or the purveyors of ideas and images that I believe in. I feel that this is a way to protect one's artists because if you work with an artist and you believe in their mission and you have a social and aesthetic joint understanding of an idea, that's something that's very important and powerful. I'm quite a difficult collaborator with other galleries because if they don't have the same connection with the artist, I personally have no reason to trust them.

Meredith Rosen: I think it's really hard to generalize. There’s good dealers, there's bad. They're people. There are humans that are better people than others. In the way that we have to trust to show an artist, sometimes we have to trust a new collector too. And I really think giving people the benefit of the doubt is what creates a new collector in the same way you create the new artists.

Elizabeth Dee: Where is the gap in terms of that generational pass-off? 

Friedrich Petzel: I have the tendency sometimes to lecture about art historical, blah, blah, blah things and then I see people glaze over. They could not care less what happened five years ago. We have to change that. Try to introduce people to the complexity and disruptive quality in these works [Nicola Tyson’s paintings] and they’ll either want to engage with this or just fuck off. I think we have to recognize that these were not made spontaneously in the last two years or so. There's a whole history of figuration in England coming over here, and so on. We have to do better in terms of communicating this to kids, by kids I mean [people] in their 30s. 

Elizabeth Dee: So it's cultural amnesia, not knowing the other 11 shows of Nicola Tyson. This is something that we've been working on at Independent to bridge that gap. We're working with a nonprofit, Contemporary Art Library. They are this year reaching a million images of exhibitions in galleries and they're banking things all the way back to the beginning of when images went digital. You can go in and type Nicola Tyson and see not only every show she's done here, but also elsewhere. It's been this invaluable tool for curators, and for education generally, understanding where artists’ bodies of work have moved and changed. We're now partnering with them to fundraise so that we can get images that were pre-digital, in transparency or slide form, on the site. Where is the actual record of what happened and then to what degree do [collectors] come into it and actually understand it to the level that they need to in order to be motivated? I think that's a huge thing and a result of the collector community just mushrooming over the last 10, 20 years. 

It used to be so small that people would come into the gallery and you would have a debate right there about the artist. You would pull stuff out of the back and people would have fights. I think for the Rubells and the Cohens and the greatest generation of New York collectors, these galleries were their masterclass in collecting. We are so lucky to have these unbelievable gallery neighborhoods. I'm surprised we're not, as New York dealers, coming together and saying, we're going to fill this gap. This is where the market is, this is where the concentration is. Let's make it happen here rather than this fragmentation that we've seen over the last decade. We're somehow lacking an ability to unify. I would love to hear more about what you think we could potentially do to drive home this really exciting potential that the next generation has to step up.

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Friedrich Petzel, Meredith Rosen, and Alexander Shulan - Features - Independent Art Fair

Meredith Rosen, photography by Alice Proujansky

Meredith Rosen: I think about it a lot, actually. One of the beautiful things about art fairs is that you have a large majority of your industry in one area and it's a gathering at some point physically. That's the beauty of Basel. You have your whole international industry in a small town and that's how history is created, exchanges, conversations, ideas. I think in a younger generation, it's looking outside of Instagram more too, trying to dig more. It just has to be their interest. You know what I mean? I guess it's a case by case basis. For a younger generation, the energy of that could be exciting for people or could not. It's hard to tell.

Elizabeth Dee: It really depends on what the driver is. And for everyone it's different. We're all here for different reasons, but I think that there is some potential there. I definitely think it's a fragmented time where there are just so many bubbles of reality happening at once that bringing that together feels somewhat daunting.

Alexander Shulan: Yeah, this has been an issue that I've thought a lot about as a dealer. I think there is kind of a generational cleavage that's happening at the moment where there's a whole new generation of young American and New York artists who were raised on a media diet that is totally independent of their art historical antecedents. That really hasn't been reflected that widely in the market or in a larger art historical context in terms of criticism. Just by virtue of the advent of digital technology, there's a whole kind of media literacy that exists amongst very, very young artists that's totally different than that of two generations prior. And it's quite an interesting moment in art for this reason. There are forms of media that are really frowned upon by the older art establishment because they’re seen as outside the confines of acceptable modes of artistic expression that now young artists are using.

There's also a social narrative around the use of, for example, social media. There are very divergent attitudes about how that kind of thing can be employed and whether or not it's productive to do so. I think you saw for a few years the rapid consumption of artworks through social media by a largely poorly informed collector class who were really consuming these objects as commercial entities and then treating them as such. And now that's slowed down. There's this really fast-paced technology that has dominated our experience of the world day-to-day that presents enormous opportunity, but enormous difficulty in terms of pedagogy. How can you educate someone about an artist when they're going to look at it for one second on a phone? This is a real problem for dealers and something to consider. As one imagines what interesting exhibitions look like and how to produce an exhibition where someone's actually going to come into the space, it’s a new problem. And, I think, a very good one.

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Friedrich Petzel is the founder of Petzel, a contemporary art gallery in Chelsea, New York. Representing over forty international artists and estates, the gallery has hosted groundbreaking and unique exhibitions in diverse media and genres. Engaged in both primary and secondary markets, Petzel has nurtured the careers of some of today’s most influential artists and has sustained long-term relationships with a broad and international roster of artists. Friedrich also operates a joint exhibition space in Berlin, called Capitain Petzel, in collaboration with Cologne’s Galerie Gisela Capitain.

Friedrich Petzel was born in Husum, Germany, and attended the University of Cologne, where he received an MFA in Art History, German Literature, and Philosophy. He entered the art world as a director at Galerie Gisela Capitain, where he focused on prints, drawings, and publishing artist's books. Friedrich moved to New York in 1991 and worked as a curator and art consultant at Thea Westreich Associates, as well as a director at Metro Pictures Gallery, before founding Petzel in 1994.


Meredith Rosen founded her gallery in 2018, providing a platform for groundbreaking international artists and estates on New York’s Upper East Side. Since its inception, Meredith Rosen Gallery has staged pioneering installation and performance pieces that generously engage with the viewer and greater public audience. Meredith earned a degree in Art History from George Washington University and a Master’s in Critical Art History from FIT. Meredith has developed a cult-like following on Instagram with her aptly named hashtag #artdealing that depicts hilarious and precarious situations pulled from the internet.  


Alexander Shulan is a New York native who started his gallery LOMEX at 26. After working as a freelance art critic, and as an assistant for a number of New York dealers, he made the decision to open a gallery in 2015. Pursuing a parallel career as an academic, he dropped out of a PHD program in literature in 2024. 

LOMEX originally opened in a historic studio space on the Bowery that once belonged to the artist Eva Hesse. The gallery moved to Tribeca in 2022 and expanded to work with a number of international artists and artist's estates. In 2023, the gallery opened a second 2,000 square foot space across the street. LOMEX has a particularly unique focus on artists overlooked by the main thrust of the contemporary art world.

Elizabeth Dee is Co-Founder and CEO of Independent Art Fair. From 2020-2022, she was the Founding Director of The John Giorno Foundation in New York. After two decades of dedication to gallery practice and collaborating with artists, she regularly lectures on the future of the art market and is a former adjunct professor of art at New York University. Previously, Dee was a gallerist in New York for twenty years, representing a global roster of artists, such as John Giorno, Adrian Piper and Ryan Trecartin.