Do you email galleries or just turn up? I turned up, and it worked exactly once
Do you write the email, or do you go and stand in the room?
I'll admit my method. In 2003 I drove to a gallery in southern Germany with three rolled canvases in the back of the car and no appointment, and I stood in the doorway until someone came out. It worked. They took two pieces, and one of them sold within the month. I have never once repeated that success, and I have sent maybe forty careful emails since, of which perhaps three got a real answer.
So I genuinely don't know which is the better way now. I suspect the walk-in only worked because it was 2003 and because I was too young to know better. But I meet people who swear the email is the only professional route, and their work is no better than mine.
Which one do you do? And has it ever actually worked, or do we all just keep doing the thing that worked once?
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I think the walk-in worked because you were there in front of them and the paintings were already unrolled, which is a different thing than an email asking someone to imagine. My experience is that galleries answer when they can see the work without effort. I have sent the careful emails too, and the ones that got a reply were the ones where I had something specific to say about the space or the show that was on, not a general introduction. The rest disappeared quietly, and I stopped taking it personally after a while.
I have never had the nerve to turn up unannounced. It sounds like it cost you something to do it, and maybe that is part of why it landed.
The unrolled canvas is the whole thing, you're right. An email asks them to do the imagining for you, and nobody in a gallery has the energy for that on a Tuesday morning. Forty kilos of wet paint leaning against their wall does the work itself.
But the cost was mostly in my stomach, not in the outcome. I was twenty-something and had nothing to lose, so I mistook nerve for strategy. Now I would not do it. The specific remark about the space or the show, that is the part I have been slow to learn. My emails were introductions, which are really about me. The three that got answers, I remember one of them, and it was because I mentioned a show of theirs I had actually seen and had a real thought about the hanging. So it was not an introduction at all.
Naja, the whole thing is a slow business either way. Nobody is waiting for us.