Art Market
Osman Can Yerebakan
Sam Kapp and Daniel Kapp. Photo by Stanley Stellar. Courtesy of Kapp Kapp.
Twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp work from two adjacent desktop computers in their eponymous Tribeca gallery. “We’re a team of two people, running the whole operation,” Sam said. Hidden behind Kapp Kapp — whose current show the group, “Lingua Franca,” features work by Susan Cianciolo, Richard Tuttle, Louis Osmosis, gallery artist Hannah Beerman, and others — are the purple computer echoes in the color of three years- with the same color butterfly logo of the old gallery. The attention to detail is shared by the partners, but the backgrounds that brought them to unite in running their own space are quite different.
After college, Sam worked with Lévy Gorvy (now LGDR) as an artist liaison with names like Pat Steir and Karin Schneider for four years, while Daniel held a position on Marian Goodman Gallery’s communications team at for half a decade. “We were lucky to go to such institutions that are run by women, especially Jewish women,” Sam told Artsy. What they call a “fiery desire” to have their own gallery became a reality when they opened Kapp Kapp in the fall of 2019, not in New York, but in their mother’s hometown, Philadelphia, where they grew up.
Philadelphia is a perfect launching pad, with a large artist population, rich museum presence, and proximity to New York — moreover, Sam had just finished his job and moved there for his girlfriend’s work. Kapp Kapp’s inaugural exhibition, “Tulips,” a single show of the works of queer New York photographer Stanley Stellar, hinted at the gallery’s future perspective from the get-go and examined many boxes on its mission .
“We’re always thinking about longevity and building careers for artists by helping the public receive and understand an artist’s language,” Sam said. Offering a bridge between the two cities, the show opened in Philadelphia’s “gayborhood” — in connection with the neighborhoods of Chinatown, Society Hill, and Rittenhouse Square — and introduced to a new viewer a somewhat unnoticed actor who the ambitious oeuvre documents a strange youth from New York. the Stonewall Uprising through the AIDS epidemic.
Installing the “Lingua Franca” view in Kapp Kapp. Courtesy of the artists and Kapp Kapp.
“We don’t approach our program to a specific category or follow a generational or material-based plan,” Sam said. That flexibility extends to the way artists discover Kapps. After following Stellar’s work on Tumblr for years, the siblings contacted the 77-year-old photographer and dug into hundreds of photos that captured formerly queer sites, such as piers and downtown. gay club. “Despite our over 40 year age gap, we have built a karmic relationship with Stanley,” Daniel added.
That initial space in Philadelphia— “an experiment,” as Kapps calls it — expanded into a Tribeca outpost in January 2020, perhaps at the worst moment to open a storefront business. “We moved into this neighborhood to be close to some of our favorite spaces like Queer Thoughts and Bortolami,” Daniel said.
Stanley Stellar, June afternoon1991. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
After a show of paintings and sculptures by New Jersey-based artist Bette Blank, their plan to open the debut exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Lily Wong coincided with the first promotion of COVID-19. They had a chance to shoot the show a day or so before the city was locked down, and they reopened their second Stellar show, “Night, Life,” in June.
The following months were a time of both growth and challenging busyness for the two, as Sam managed the Philadelphia gallery and Daniel zigzagged between Brooklyn (where he lives with his girlfriend), Midtown (for at his weekday work at Marian Goodman Gallery), and Tribeca (for working at Kapp Kapp every weekend). “Come to think of it, the seven -day work schedule is ambitious,” Daniel recalls. He is leaving the security of his full-time job in 2021. Moving away from continuous work to focus on Kapp Kapp is a step the siblings have taken in “blind optimism,” but their backgrounds in the gallery world are gave them valuable insight into running their own, “like planning the calendar in advance — we already know the programming for the next year and a half.”
Those insights also helped them make decisions from difficult to exciting. For example, they closed the Philadelphia chapter this past January, although they maintain an office there and hope to occasionally arrange one-off curatorial projects. “Philadelphia’s way of engaging with the arts is slower, and we need to build our presence in one location,” the brothers explain. On a happier note, one location is evolving: They moved to a new space in Tribeca five times larger than their original gallery in New York earlier this year. They inaugurated the new location with a show of photos of Stellar, which focused on his work documenting the piers. Narrating New York’s historic temple of queer intimacy, the photos show the Hudson River waterfront as a hub for hook-ups and a relic of industrialist architecture.
“We have a commitment to our artists that the works have leveled up, and we’re excited to be a part of this moment with them,” Daniel said of the gallery’s growth. Over the gallery’s three -year history, artists like Molly Greene, Luke O’Halloran, and Wong have had their solo debut at Kapp Kapp. And while growing up with newcomers is a goal, caring for the heritage of others is also key. “We’re fortunate to have developed amazing relationships with emerging artists, but we see ourselves as more of an emerging gallery,” Sam said.
During this time, Kapp Kapp re-introduced the work of previous generations: In addition to Stellar, artist Gilbert Lewis had his first single show in 14 years with Kapp Kapp in 2020. The Keeping Lewis’s work is especially important to gallerists, as he hasn’t made any new paintings in the past decade due to Alzheimer’s disease. “We need to be aware of informing the public about Gilbert’s paintings of bizarre life in the right way,” Sam said, “and speak up for an artist who can’t afford to do it for himself.”
Championing queer artists is an organic result of the siblings ’mutual interests and tastes, whether looking for new talent or contextualizing neglected activities for a new audience. “Queerness is central to our thinking with no generational or stylistic priority,” Daniel said. In this direction, they promise that the gallery’s upcoming programming will be “very Kapp Kapp.”
That will include the New York debut of Paris -based chunky male figures by Alex Foxton with abstract cues; a joint show with Montana-based twin ceramic artists Haylie and Sydnie Jimenez; and an exhibition researching native artist Clementine Hunter, who lived in Louisiana for about 100 years in the 20th century. A single show in September with Greene will coincide with the gallery’s first Armory Show presentation in the “Gifts” section of the fair, with a booth dedicated to the large canvases of Providence -based Velvet Other World.
Kapp Kapp will also publish its first catalog this fall, a publication dedicated to Stellar’s larger collection of work. Continually supporting the photographer’s perspective is another appropriate first for a gallery that isn’t afraid to take risks while promoting its short perspective.
