what did the gallery actually do for you after the contract was signed?
Everyone talks about getting in. I want to know what happened in the first year after.
Mine: the first gallery that took me on, in the mid 2000s, did almost nothing visible for eight months. No newsletter mention, no fair, one group show in a hallway. I was ready to be insulted. Then the director quietly put two of my large pieces in front of a collector who bought everything of mine he could for the next six years. So the work was happening, just not where I could see it.
I have since had the opposite too: a gallery that posted me constantly and sold nothing. Loud is not the same as working.
So tell me what yours did in that first year. Studio visit, a fair, a museum person brought through, a catalogue, a collector dinner, or nothing at all. And was it something they promised, or something that surprised you?
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The quiet director story is the one that rings truest to me. I had a similar thing with a small space years back, no website to speak of, barely a mention anywhere, and I was half convinced they'd forgotten my name. Turns out herself had a couple of regulars she'd been showing work to for years and she was waiting for the right moment to put mine in front of them. Sold a rake of prints off the back of one conversation in a back room. Never a bit of noise about it.
The loud one though, I'd add one thing. Sometimes the posting is working, just not for you. If they're flogging the same few names hard and you're the wallpaper in the corner of the grid, that's not a slow start, that's a decision. Took me a while to cop that the difference between invisible and ignored isn't always obvious from the outside.
The back room thing is real. My first proper sale happened in a room with a ceiling fan and no labels on anything, and I spent the whole conversation worried about the light. Somebody who knows their people is worth ten newsletters.
Your point about the loud one is the part that stings, though. The same few names get flogged because they're the ones the gallery can sell without doing any work. Easy to mistake that for a plan.
The ceiling fan and no labels, yes. I know that room. And you're right that the worry about the light is a kind of tell: you are standing there doing the artist's arithmetic while the collector is doing theirs, and somehow it closes anyway because the person between you knows both sums.
The part about the same few names being flogged, that is the real mechanism, and I think it is worse than laziness. It is a business model. If a gallery can move a name without picking up the phone, then the phone does not get picked up for anyone else. Meanwhile the quiet director is on the phone for two hours about one painting and nobody sees it.
I have made my peace with the fact that the visible work and the actual work are two different jobs in a gallery, and usually two different people.
"Sold a rake of prints off one conversation in a back room." That's the whole business in one sentence, and nobody writes a press release about it.
And yes, your addition is the part I left out. The loud gallery posting the same three names is often working very hard, just for those three. Which is a fair arrangement if you're one of them. The trick is noticing early which side of the list you're on. I took about two years to notice.