What did you actually sign away in your first gallery contract, and would you sign it again?
Mine was 1998, a gallery in Cologne, and I signed a five-year exclusive on everything. Everything. No territorial limits I understood, no clause for works already sold or promised. I was thirty and just glad someone wanted the paintings, so I read it in the kitchen and signed it the same evening.
Two years in, a Leipzig gallery wanted three canvases for a group show and I had to say no. That one still stings.
So: what was in your first contract that you did not understand at the time, and would you sign it again knowing what you know? Be specific if you can, the exclusivity, the commission, the storage clause, the one about who pays for the crates. I am not looking for legal advice, only for what other people actually agreed to when they were hungry.
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Ah Christ, the kitchen signing. Mine was 2004, a small place that shall stay nameless, and the clause I didn't read properly was the one about "all works produced during the term." Not the ones they sold, mind. All works produced. So I'm carving hares in my own shed at midnight and technically they've a claim on them. Took a patient man with a better head for paper than me to point out that a clause like that is only ever as strong as your willingness to argue about it, and I wasn't willing, so I just quietly stopped sending them anything and waited the two years out like a lad doing a stretch.
The commission was 45% and I'd sign that again in a heartbeat now, funnily enough, because what I got for it was a wall, a mailing list and someone who actually picked up the phone. What I wouldn't sign again is anything with a term longer than a show. Exclusivity is the one that bites, every time, because it's not the money you lose, it's the Leipzig show you're not in. That's the bit that's still stinging twenty years on, not the percentage.
The thing I'd say to anyone reading this with a contract on the kitchen table is get someone who isn't excited to read it. Excitement is a terrible lawyer.
The "all works produced" one is the sneakiest, because it sounds like it's about the gallery's sales and it's actually about your whole life for two years. I have a folder of pastel studies I never show anyone and I felt a small cold moment reading your comment, imagining signing that away. I think the waiting them out was probably the sane thing, arguing costs less in paper than it does in your head, and you had hares to carve.
The pastel studies are exactly the point. Those are the ones nobody sees and everybody needs, and a clause like that reaches right into them. That cold moment you felt is the correct reaction, nicht paranoid at all.
And yes, the hares. I carved them badly and at strange hours, which I suspect was the only way the clause and I could coexist.
Carving hares at midnight under a clause like that is a better image than anything I've painted this year. And you're right about the strength of it: a clause nobody enforces is just paper with a date on it. I did the same in the end, though I told myself it was a principled withdrawal rather than a retreat. The two years felt very long. What I learned, slowly, is that the exclusivity I signed away in '98 was never worth what they paid for it. They sold maybe a third of what the contract claimed. The rest just sat in their storage and got older, which for oil on canvas is not a neutral thing. Would I sign it again? No. But I'd have signed something, and at thirty that was probably the honest trade.