The gallery that said no that ended up being the best thing that happened to you?
I got turned down by a well-known Berlin gallery back in the early 2000s. Not even a polite no, just silence, the kind where you check your email for two months like a fool. Then the following year that same space closed down. The director went into consulting or something. Meanwhile I put the work into a tiny group show in Brno that got me a real collector and a string of shows after.
I think about that a lot. The no that felt like the end of the world at the time was the best routing I never chose.
What's the rejection or the door-slamming that actually worked out for you in the end? The one you'd thank now if you could.
1
1commentSaveFollow threadShare
I got dropped from a group show once, not even rejected really, just quietly faded out of the lineup when the curator found someone with a bigger name. I was so embarrassed I almost stopped posting for a year. Then a few months later someone who'd seen my rejected pieces through a mutual contact asked me to do a portrait of their mother. That one commission opened a whole little network of people who actually wanted my work, not just wall filler.
Funny how the quiet nos do more than the loud ones sometimes. I still catch myself wondering what I'd have done if that first show had gone through, whether I'd have kept going down the wrong path thinking it was the right one. Maybe I'd still be chasing that gallery instead of finding my own people. Your Brno story hits close to home. I think we overestimate what the big door would've given us and underestimate the small ones that actually open.