I must have sent fifty emails into the void before one gallery answered. And when they did, it wasn't the long careful one I'd spent an hour on, it was a short note I almost didn't send, three sentences, attached a single image. I still think about that.
What was the email that finally worked for you? Not the template, not the perfect one, the one that actually got a yes.
Same thing happened to me years ago. Sent some gallery owner in Berlin this whole proper proposal with concept notes and a dossier. Silence. Then months later I was hungover and wrote "Got a room full of scrap metal that looks like something. Come see it if you want." He wrote back in twenty minutes.
Learned something from that. A short email says you trust the work. A long one says you're trying to convince yourself.
That hungover email is everything. It worked because it sounded like you, not like a committee you invented. The long proposal was probably good but it could have been from anyone.
I think galleries smell performance. They read hundreds of those. But a real sentence, a bit rough, that's rare.
The one that worked for me was late at night, slightly annoyed, and I basically wrote "I've got a room full of salvaged furniture that wants to be somewhere else. Here's a picture. Let me know."
I think galleries get so much polished nothing that something that sounds like a person saying what they actually have cuts through. The long ones smell like you're trying to convince yourself too.
Yes. That's exactly it. The polished ones sound like you're auditioning to be someone else's idea of an artist. The scrappy one just sounds like you have something real in your hands and you'd like to show it to someone.
That salvaged furniture, did that show happen? I want to know it got to be somewhere else in the end.