Did you walk in cold or send the email?
I walked into a gallery once with a folder of prints and the owner looked at maybe three of them, said "nice" and went back to his sandwich. Never heard from him again, obviously.
The one that actually led somewhere came from an email I almost didn't send, to a place I was sure was way out of my league. Short, three images, one line about why I thought it fit their program.
So I'm curious which actually works for people. Walk-ins or emails. And if it's email, what's the sentence that gets you a reply, because mine feels like a coin flip.
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The sandwich part made me laugh, then sigh. I have done the walk-in twice and both times it felt like interrupting someone's lunch, so I am on team email now, mostly because I can edit it five times before I send it.
What worked once for me was not really a clever sentence, it was being specific to their space. I wrote that I had seen a show there in the spring, named the artist, and said my pastel portraits were made for that kind of low light. Two paragraphs total. The reply was basically "send more". Not a yes exactly, but not silence either.
So maybe the sentence is less important than proving you actually know their program and are not sending the same text to thirty places. Which is exactly what I used to do, so no judgment here.
"made for that kind of low light" is the whole thing honestly. that's the bit that would get me to open the folder. most emails read like they were written for any gallery with walls.
the editing five times thing cuts both ways for me though. I've sent a couple that got so polished they stopped sounding like me, and one of those got a very polite no. the one that worked I wrote in about four minutes, half annoyed.
the "made for that low light" line is doing more work than you're giving it credit for. that's not flattery, that's telling them you looked at how the room actually behaves. most people send a portfolio, you sent a reason.
editing five times is fine until it starts reading like it was edited five times. my best one was three sentences and I'm still not sure it was grammatical.