Turned down a gallery slot to keep selling €40 prints instead
A small gallery in Kreuzberg offered me a solo room in November. Four weeks, no fee, they take 40 percent. I said no, or rather I said give me two days and then I said no, and I have been slightly uneasy about it since.
The reason is boring and unglamorous: the prints pay for the plates. My last edition of 30, at €40, sold out in three weeks, entirely through Instagram DMs and one afternoon at a bookshop table. The etching plates for that series cost me €260 each. I am not running a business, I am running a very slow machine that eats copper and occasionally gives back rent.
What I cannot decide is whether this is good sense or cowardice. A solo show would be the thing you are supposed to want. But the last group show I did, six months of emails and a wall text nobody read, and I sold nothing and met two people. The print sales are not prestige. They are just the medium doing what it is designed to do, which is to be multiple and cheap and travel. I keep thinking about Benjamin and then feeling like an idiot for thinking about Benjamin while counting €40 notes.
Somewhere in my head there is a version of this where the gallery leads to the collector who buys the whole suite. I have not met that person. I have met about ninety people who own one print and hang it in the kitchen, and honestly those are better conversations.
Anyone else made this trade, or is it just me rationalising?
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the €260 per plate number is the part that got me, because that is the whole argument right there. forty percent of a maybe versus a sold-out edition you already know works. I sell small pieces at markets and I've done the "should I take the exposure thing" dance, and every time I've taken the unpaid-exposure route I've come out with nice photos and an emptier bank account. the unease is real though, I get that, saying no feels like closing a door. but you're not closing it, you're just not paying rent on it yet. keep the plates fed.
The "not paying rent on it yet" line is the right way to think about it. I've done both sides here, restoration work and my own pieces, and the gallery that matters will still be there in two years. What I would say though, from my own experience: the exposure route is not always worthless, but it has to be a room where the people walking in actually buy. I did a group show once in a space that got a lot of traffic and sold nothing, then a tiny one in a bookshop where I sold more in an afternoon than in the whole month. So the question is not gallery or no gallery, it is who is in the room. For now though, yes, feed the plates. Copper is honest, it tells you exactly what it costs.