Do you email galleries or just walk in? I only ever walked in, and I'm wondering if that door is closed now
A young painter asked me last week how to approach a gallery and I realised I had no honest answer for her, because I have never once sent a cold email in my life.
Every gallery I have worked with, I walked in. Literally. In the nineties in Leipzig you went to the opening, you stood there with a glass of bad wine, you talked to whoever was at the desk, and somewhere in the following two years something happened. My first real representation came out of a group show I nearly did not enter, and the rest came from people who had seen the work in a room, not on a screen.
Now everyone tells me the walk-in is dead. Curators do not have time, the door is a website form, the portfolio is a PDF that gets opened on a phone in a taxi.
So I want to know how it actually went for you. Did you email, or did you go in person? And if you emailed, what was the thing that made it work, because I genuinely do not know.
I'm half expecting to be told I'm living in the past. Tell me.
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It wasn't a door, exactly. It was a slow room, and slow rooms are what's gone. I work in paper conservation part time and show modestly, and the walking in only ever worked because you were in the same city, at the same opening, over and over, until the person behind the desk knew your face before they knew your name.
That part still functions. What changed is that everyone can now send the same email to the same forty galleries on a Sunday afternoon, so the desk has to triage in a way it never did. A cold email isn't a closed door, it's just a much worse ratio. I'd tell the young painter to do both, but honestly the old way, badly, is better than the new way, well. Being in a room where the work is on the wall still does something a jpeg can't.
"A much worse ratio" is the honest way to put it, better than the door metaphor everyone reaches for. One correction though: the Sunday email blast is not new in kind, only in volume. We had the same thing with slide packets, photocopied CVs, the whole envelope with the international reply coupon. Every desk in Europe had a drawer of them. The drawer got full and the drawer stopped being opened. What actually got me in, both before and after, was being in the room when something was being decided, or standing next to someone who would be. So I would not tell the young painter to email or to walk in. I would tell her to find the smallest room in her city where work is actually being argued about, the one with bad chairs, and go there until she is part of the furniture. The gallery will find her there. It always did.
The drawer. Yes. I had forgotten the drawer, and now I can see it exactly, the one behind the desk at a gallery in Dresden that was full to the top by 1998. Nobody threw anything away, they just stopped pulling it open. That is a worse fate than being rejected, somehow.
But I want to push back on one thing, because it is the part I keep arguing with myself about. "Being in the room when something was decided" is right, and it is also the most expensive advice in the world. The room costs money to stand in. Opening, travel, the years of being present before anything is decided at all. For me in Leipzig that was nearly free, the scene was small and I was already in it. For the young painter asking me, it might mean a flight and a hotel and an unpaid week. So I give her your answer and I hear how it sounds in her situation.
Which is maybe why I do not tell her either. I tell her to move to a city with rooms in it and be poor there for a while, which is honest and also useless.
"Slow room" is better than anything I managed in the post, I'll take that. And you're right that the part still functions, which is the thing people forget when they declare the whole model dead. The ratio is the problem, not the mechanism.
The bit about knowing your face before your name, though. That is exactly it, and it is also the part that costs something nobody warns the young painter about. Two years of openings in one city, bad wine, small talk with the same six people. That is not networking in the LinkedIn sense, it is just being present, and presence is expensive. Rent, time, energy. Some people can afford that and some cannot, and the ones who cannot are not less serious about the work. I don't have a clean answer for that either, only the observation.