The history of Galerie Edition Raphael is inseparably linked to the history of its founder, Petru Petrov.
My father – born in 1932 in the northern-romanian city Bacau – immigrated along with my mother to Germany in 1970.
In his former and first professional life my father was an opera singer and part of the ensemble of the Darmstädter Opera. Music had affected him from early childhood on and surely influenced his aesthetic sensation also in regard to visual arts. But by the end of the 1970s, cigarettes had brought his singing career to an inevitable end…
It was a casual acquaintance with fellow Romanian painter Horia Damian who sparked the idea to face the adventure of running an art gallery. Damian gave my, at that time rather low-spirited father the following advice: “If you don’t know what you should do, now that you are not singing anymore, look for a nice retail space and organize an exhibition of my works.”
My father always had been a man of action and didn’t have to be asked twice. So in April 1981 he inaugurated his first gallery located in Frankfurt’s Westend (Feldbergstrasse 2) with an exhibition by Horia Damian. In 1983 the opening of our present gallery space in downtown Domstrasse 6 followed.