Galerie am Moritzplatz was an artist-run gallery in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, founded in 1977 by Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer while they were still students at the Hochschule der Künste (HdK). It became the primary exhibition venue and institutional home for the Junge Wilden generation.
The gallery occupied a storefront or basement space near Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood that was then cheap, marginal, and heavily Turkish-immigrant — a world away from the official art institutions of West Berlin. The founders organized shows for themselves and their peers without curatorial mediation, selling works directly and building a local audience that crossed between the art school, the punk clubs, and the gay scene.
The gallery’s significance is twofold: first, as a self-organized alternative to the commercial gallery system (Galerie Michael Werner, Galerie Springer) that had supported the older Neo-Expressionists; second, as the site where the Junge Wilden’s stylistic differences from the core generation became visible. Where Baselitz and Kiefer showed at established Cologne and Berlin galleries with international reach, the Junge Wilden built their own infrastructure from scratch — a classic avant-garde move that also made them more vulnerable to market collapse when the boom ended.
The gallery closed around the mid-1980s as the Junge Wilden artists moved to commercial representation (Fetting to Marlborough, Salomé to Deschler) and the West Berlin real-estate market shifted.
See also
- Rainer Fetting — co-founder
- Salomé — co-founder
- Helmut Middendorf — co-founder
- Junge Wilden — the movement the gallery housed
- Galerie Michael Werner — the commercial model the Junge Wilden eventually joined