Two eras will come to an end when Fleet Galleries closes its doors for the final time on Dec. 31.
The art gallery and picture-framing business has been a fixture on Albert Street since 1983 when Jeff Gasenzer’s father, Klaus Gasenzer, took over a struggling gallery on Fleet Avenue in River Heights and moved it to the Exchange District to follow a family tradition that goes back seven generations.
Jeff Gasenzer learned picture-framing from Klaus, who in turn learned it from his father. Jeff Gasenzer is part of a family of picture framers that goes back to 1866, when his great-great grandfather, Heinrich Gasenzer, took up the vocation in the former German region of east Prussia.
Jeff Gasenzer’s Fleet Galleries will close its doors after being in business for 40 years.
“All I can say is I got into it because of my family,” says Jeff Gasenzer, who taught picture-framing to his son Jeffrey. “At the time I got into it I wasn’t sure if I was ready to do the whole thing, but I got more and more interested in it.”
So there is some sadness in the gallery amid its final exhibition — Where We Were by Nova Scotia artists Bob and Meg Hainstock — and the whirring of saws that Jeffrey operates during a Christmas rush so busy that Fleet is turning away last-minute shoppers seeking new frames for gifts.
Forty years of exhibitions, one per month, brought a wealth of Winnipeg art history to Fleet Galleries, whether it was holographic art by Terry Skakum and cubist works by Spanish painter Toni Martinez Caballer in the 1980s or Clayton Russell’s wildlife paintings and Kelly Clark’s tortured self-portraits during the 1990s.
“Many different artists — I can’t list them all off, there were so many of them,” Gasenzer says. “Some realistic art, some abstract, Indigenous art.
“We did a lot of the framing for the Manitoba Métis Federation and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.”
Early works by Winnipeg printmaker Miriam Rudolph, who has since been part of a Winnipeg Art Gallery exhibition on the 150th anniversary of the Free Press, have graced Fleet Galleries’ walls in recent years.
So have retrospectives by artist Ted Korol, who painted in his spare time when he wasn’t teaching or designing costumes for theatrical productions at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Rainbow Stage, and Japanese Canadian Toki Orui, whose paintings included her interpretations of the domed peace memorial in Hiroshima.
Fleet Galleries has been on Albert Street since 1983.
In 2017, Gasenzer welcomed Syrian refugee Nadim Odo to bring his brushes and easel to the gallery and create works for an exhibition that opened only months after Odo brought his family to Winnipeg to escape the civil war in his homeland.
Gasenzer first met Odo when the artist visited the Fleet Galleries during First Fridays at the Exchange. The gallery has been part of the monthly event since it began in 2010 and Gasenzer has been a member of its board.
When First Fridays kicks off a new year on Jan. 5, it’ll be the first time Fleet Galleries won’t be part of the art celebration. The Gasenzers’ enthusiasm will be missed, says Karen Schultz, the event’s director.
“They saw the big picture and understood that a community is strengthened when everyone supports a common effort,” Schultz writes in an email. “Whenever we needed a space to present an event, an Art Talk or a fundraiser, Fleet Galleries was offered freely and without hesitation.”
Fleet Galleries was also a stop for Open Doors Winnipeg’s annual tours of the city’s historic landmarks. Visitors were given an opportunity to view the art Fleet had on display, as well as also a glance inside the Hammond Building, which was built in 1902 and is a national historic site.
Gasenzer, 65, has kidney disease — he undergoes four-hour dialysis treatments at Seven Oaks hospital three times a week — and said he doesn’t have the time and energy to keep the gallery going.
He’s been able to sell most of the 50 or so paintings Fleet Galleries had accumulated over the past 40 years and welcomed those who have bought frames and paintings who visited in December for one last look at what Fleet is showing.
Jeff Gasenzer (below) learned picture framing from his father Klaus Gasenzer, who took over Fleet Galleries in 1983.
“A lot of my clients are very sad that we’re closing, but they understand that I am not well,” he says.
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Alan Small
Reporter
Alan Small has been a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the latest being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.
