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Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

The curator called yesterday. Said the new piece was strong but could I make it "more optimistic." The piece is a room made from a collapsed factory wall and four hundred broken office chairs. Optimistic. I told her I'd think about it and hung up and stood in the studio laughing for a while. What is she picturing. The chairs reassembled into a smiley face. A sun made of shredded payslips on the wall. Look, I'm not naive, I know what sells and what gets the email rewritten to include the word "uplifting." But I'm fifty-eight. I've spent thirty years building rooms out of what people threw away, and the point was never to comfort anyone. The point was that these things are heavy and they happened and they're still here. I don't know how to make a collapsed wall optimistic without lying to you, and I've lied to myself about smaller things than that my whole life, so maybe I could, but I won't. She'll send a follow-up next week. I'll reply that the chairs are turning toward the light. That's optimistic enough.

Group show in Berlin, 2019. Curator with a good reputation, well-known space, the whole thing sounded serious. She said there was no budget for artist fees but the exposure would be valuable. I was between shows anyway so I said yes like a fool. I built a room installation. Three weeks of work, rented a van to drive materials up from Prague, stayed in a friend's flat but still bought food and beer for two weeks, paid an assistant for two days of help mounting things. I kept receipts out of spite, I think. Total cost to me: 38,400 CZK. About 1,500 euros then. The exhibition got a mention in Artforum online. One collector came through and later commissioned a small piece. That commission paid 800 euros. So I lost 700 euros and gained a line in a newsletter nobody remembers. I tell young artists this story now and they nod and then they still do the same thing. I did it too when I was their age. Maybe you have to learn it yourself.

Last spring I sent a quote to a small Kunsthalle for a room installation. Fourteen thousand euros. Materials, three weeks of my time, the two students who help me weld and haul, transport from the depot in Holešovice, and the part nobody budgets for, which is the week at the end where you walk through the thing alone and move eleven objects until it stops feeling wrong. The reply came back the next morning. She asked whether the fourteen thousand was per square metre. I sat with that for a while. Not because she was being rude. Because she genuinely did not know what she was looking at. In her head a room of art is a quantity, like gravel or plasterboard, and it must have a unit price. Somewhere in her institution there is a spreadsheet column for that. I wrote back and said no, it is for the whole room, and then I halved it, because I wanted the show and because I am fifty-eight and still doing that. Seven thousand. She said it was a lot for a temporary project. I said nothing for two days. Then I signed. The thing I keep chewing on is that the number was never the problem. I could have held fourteen and she would have found it, institutions find money when they want the work. The problem is I have no vocabulary for defending the figure. I can talk about assemblage for an hour. Ask me why a room costs what it costs and I go quiet and discount myself like a man haggling over his own coat. I am told younger artists have this figured out. I hope so. It took me thirty years to learn to weld properly and I still cannot say a price out loud without apologizing in the same sentence.

After a long time away from showing, I sent a small group of interiors to a gallery in Paris. They said the work was good, but asked if I could push the palette warmer, more decorative, because that's what sells to their clientele. I said no. It cost me the show. I've never regretted it, but I've wondered since if I was too rigid. Some artists say you have to bend a little at the start, then take back the reins later. Others say once you bend it's over, you're their painter now. What did you do when a gallery asked you to change your work, and did it pay off or not?

I have a room up in Brno at the moment, close to finished, and the piece is not working. Not badly. Just working less than it did on Tuesday. The fault is a piece of glass. I put a rusted gate from a demolished dairy under a big vitrine because the space needed a divider and I had the vitrine and no better idea. And now everyone who walks in goes straight to the gate and stands there, quiet, moved. I have watched people do it all week. It is a good gate. But they are not looking at the twelve other things in the room that took me eight months and three friends' vans and a bad knee. I am starting to suspect I made a very expensive display case for one object and told myself it was a composition. The other possibility, which I like less, is that the vitrine is genuinely the best decision in the room and I am only annoyed because it was the laziest one. Tomorrow I either take the glass away or I stop lying to myself about what the piece is. I lean toward removing it, but I have removed things before out of pride and made rooms worse. So. If you have ever had a container outshine its contents, what did you actually do.

She stood in front of the big one from last spring, the 200 by 160, and said the top third looks unfinished. Not wrong, unfinished. Then she moved on to the next wall. The thing is, that third is the only part of the painting I would defend. It is three passes of cold wax scraped back almost to the ground, thin enough that you see the weave and the underpainting breathing through. It took longer than the rest put together. It is quiet on purpose. Her eye wanted something to land on there, and I understand the wanting, but I have been making the case for ten years that a painting is allowed to have a place where nothing happens. Now I am in the studio three days later and I catch myself looking at that corner like it is a mistake. This is the part nobody warns you about. The critique does not become a thought, it becomes a light source, and everything looks a little different under it. I do not think I will change it. But I am less sure than I was on Tuesday, and I resent that a little. Naja. Has anyone else had a remark like this lodge in the eye and refuse to leave? And did you hold the line or did you eventually see what they saw?

For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

some guy at a cafe yesterday saw me working on a sketch, came over, loved it, said he runs a "curated online gallery" (instagram account with 300 followers). wanted to feature me. for free. in exchange for "exposure to his network." i asked him how many sales his featured artists usually get from it. he said "well it's more about building relationships." so i said cool, let's build one where you pay me. he did not think that was funny. he left me his card anyway. the card had a stock photo of a paintbrush on it.

Small thing but it changes everything for me. My work is heavy. It's not canvas, it's stone and glass set into a panel, and if it hangs wrong it either pulls off the wall or reads flat and dead. So when a gallery takes me on, I hand over a sheet: weight, where the anchors go, what light it can and can't take, the exact height it should sit. I've had curators thank me for it and one who acted like I was insulting her by telling her her job. So I'm curious. Do you send gallery-specific instructions with the work, or do you let them hang it their way and keep your mouth shut? My rule now: I bring the hardware, I write the sheet, and I stand there while it goes up if they'll let me. Cost me one show to learn it. Anyone else do this, or am I being fussy?

A young painter asked me last week how to approach a gallery and I realised I had no honest answer for her, because I have never once sent a cold email in my life. Every gallery I have worked with, I walked in. Literally. In the nineties in Leipzig you went to the opening, you stood there with a glass of bad wine, you talked to whoever was at the desk, and somewhere in the following two years something happened. My first real representation came out of a group show I nearly did not enter, and the rest came from people who had seen the work in a room, not on a screen. Now everyone tells me the walk-in is dead. Curators do not have time, the door is a website form, the portfolio is a PDF that gets opened on a phone in a taxi. So I want to know how it actually went for you. Did you email, or did you go in person? And if you emailed, what was the thing that made it work, because I genuinely do not know. I'm half expecting to be told I'm living in the past. Tell me.

I will start. A dealer once asked me to paint a specimen considerably larger than life, in a stronger red than the plant actually is, because "the wall needs heat." I declined and lost the show, and I would decline again, though I confess I thought about it for a week. So: what has a gallery or curator asked you to alter? Size, palette, framing, subject, a background that isn't there in nature. Did you hold your ground or give in, and how did it turn out either way? I'm genuinely interested in where people draw the line, and whether anyone has changed a piece and been glad they did.

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

Ok so I want to hear the actual stories, not the polished "I just kept making work and eventually..." version. Mine: there's a café near me with really good light and I basically went in every week and eventually the owner let me hang six pieces. Sold two. One to the barista. I have never felt more famous than that week haha. It was NOT a gallery, it was a café, and it counted. So how did your first one actually happen? Cold email? Walked in with a portfolio? Friend of a friend? Messaged a curator at 1am (no judgement, I have almost done this)? Tell me yours, I want the real version. Also if you've never landed one yet, what's the thing you're most scared to try? I'll tell you if I'd do it.

They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down. Which it is, a little. That is the piece. So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in. My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake. I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

okay I need to know if this is just me or if this is universal, how did you land your first gallery showing? like the real first one, not the group show your friend curated. I've been sending portfolios out for months and the closest I've gotten is a gallery that was really warm via email for three months, asked for more photos, said they'd "circle back," and then just... stopped replying. I followed up twice and nothing. I don't even know if I should keep emailing them or take the hint. my own answer is honestly embarassing, my first "gallery" thing was a coffee shop that let me hang stuff near the bathroom. which was nice! but I'm trying to level up and I feel like I'm doing something wrong. tell me your first real gallery story, good or bad. did you email? walk in? know someone? I need to know what actually works vs what we're all just guessing at

Got my first real show at 34, after ten years of fabrication work and nobody knowing my name. Walked in with photographs of a commission I'd done for a church, stone and steel, and the owner just looked at them and said bring it in. No resume, no slides, no nonsense. That was the old way. But I've watched enough younger artists since to know that's not how it goes for most people now. Connections, a residency, a curator who happened to be in the room. Which was it for you, the work or the contact? And be honest, because I've got a theory that everyone thinks they got in on merit and most of them didn't.