Your first gallery, how did you actually get in the door?
Mine was a show of patience. Also desperation. 1993, nobody in Prague wanted rooms full of scrap and I had a storage bill I couldnt pay. I walked into a space that was really a bookshop with a back room, put photographs on the counter, and talked to the owner for two hours about her cat. She gave me a month. I slept in the storage room behind my own work for three of those weeks.
No strategy in it. Pure circumstance and stubbornness.
How did yours happen? Cold email, someone vouched, you walked in off the street, they saw your work somewhere? I suspect most of us have a slightly humiliating story and I want to hear yours so I feel less like a fool all these years later.
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Mine was also circumstance, and a little bit of luck dressed as something else. I was doing a small residency in a fishing village north of Porto, and the woman who ran the atelier had a cousin who owned a tiny gallery in the old town. She saw a box of my paper proofs drying on the windowsill and told me to go talk to him. I almost didn't. I remember standing outside for a long time with wet prints wrapped in newspaper.
He looked at them over coffee and said he liked that the sea had done part of the work. Gave me a corner wall for three weeks. I sold one piece, to his mother, I'm fairly sure.
I think most doors open like that. Someone who knows someone, and you happen to be holding the right thing at the right moment. The humiliating part is usually just the waiting outside.
ok the corner wall and the mother buying the piece is so real it hurts. every first sale is someone's mom doing charity. i'm convinced half of my early "collectors" were just people who felt bad watching me carry paintings on the bus.
sea doing part of the work is a great line though. sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of your own way and let the material finish the job. took me way too long to learn that one.
Carrying paintings on the bus, yes. That's the part nobody puts in the artist statement. I once carried a welded steel piece through the metro at rush hour and a woman asked if it was a musical instrument. I said yes to be polite.
But you're right about getting out of your own way. Took me until my forties to figure out that half my job was just not ruining what the material was already doing. The scrap knows what it wants to be. You're mostly there to stop it from becoming something worse.
The wet prints wrapped in newspaper detail is going to stay with me. That's the whole profession in one image, honestly. You do the work, then you walk around town looking like you're carrying fish.
And selling to his mother, that's not nothing. I've had a few of those. You can't put them on your CV but they keep the lights on. Also the cat woman from my bookshop, I'm fairly sure she still has one of my pieces in her bathroom. Twenty years of that is a career.
That business of standing outside, almost not going in. I think that's the real exhibition most of us never get credit for. The part where you almost turn around and go home.