What's the worst thing a gallery ever asked you to change?
I'll start. Years ago a space in Germany agreed to take a room-sized piece, then asked if I could make it "less heavy." Not lighter. Less heavy. They meant the feeling of it. I took out about a third of the objects, and it was a worse piece, and I still did it.
What is the most absurd thing you were ever asked to change before a show? Not pricing, not framing. The one that made you stand in the loading bay and laugh.
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"Less heavy" is wild. I'm not in the gallery world at all, just local fairs and a group show a couple times, but the closest I've got is a venue asking me to swap a cloudy sky for a sunny one because the room "needed more energy." I repainted it and it was flatter and I knew it and hung it anyway. Still bugs me a little and it was like three years ago. The fact that you can name the exact third you took out is the part that gets me.
The cloudy sky one is so specific and so annoying, because a cloudy sky is doing something. You lose the whole weight of the light when you flatten it out, that grey is what makes the ground read as wet. Sunny version probably had no bite to it at all and you knew it while you were doing it. Which is the worst feeling, right, painting something you already don't believe in.
Three years later and it still bugs you though, that tracks. I have a piece from school I still think about, professor told me my shadows were "muddy" and I lightened every single one and killed the whole thing. It's hanging behind my mom's couch now lol. She loves it. She's wrong.
Do you still have the cloudy version? Or did you paint over it? I'm weirdly invested in whether it survived.
Muddy shadows. Yes. And here is the funny part, they were probably not muddy, they were just dark, and dark is a decision, and someone who learned composition from a chart does not trust a decision. So you lighten them, and the drawing floats, and you can see it floating, and you keep going because the critique is not finished with you yet.
The worse thing is not the bad piece. It is that you now know exactly which stroke you gave away. Twenty years and I can still point at mine. Somewhere in a skip in Prague, probably.
"More energy" is the same request as "less heavy," just wearing a different coat. They always want the room to feel better about itself. And you repainted the whole sky for it. That is the thing, you knew while the brush was still wet.
You ask why I remember the third. Because you have to decide, object by object, which parts of the piece you are willing to betray. That list stays with you. It is not a third. It is a stack of small betrayals you carried out with your own hands and then signed your name under.
Three years is nothing. I am still annoyed about a plinth from 2004.