In the popular imagination, an art dealer has only two tasks: organising exhibitions and selling art. Although this conception isn’t necessarily wrong, it glosses over a whole cosmos of subtleties required to do the job well, including managing the behind-the-scenes tension of serving both artists and collectors—two constituencies whose interests do not always perfectly align.
This challenge was one of the subjects covered in a lively panel discussion held in Manhattan on 29 January, as part of Downtown Dealers—a conversation series for New York gallerists established by the collector and adviser Bill Cournoyer. The discussion, the first since Downtown Dealers was acquired by the Independent art fair, brought together Alexander Shulan, the founder of Tribeca’s buzzy Lomex gallery; Meredith Rosen, whose venturesome namesake gallery spans two locations on the Upper East Side; and Friedrich Petzel, whose blue-chip Chelsea space hosted the evening event.
Shulan, who founded Lomex in 2015, aged 26, broached the balancing act in response to a question from Elizabeth Dee, the discussion’s moderator and Independent’s co-founder. As his gallery has become more successful, Shulan said, he has moved from “really spending all [his] time with artists” to “often” spending time with collectors. Navigating this, he added, results “in a kind of internal conflict in the creative machinations of exhibition production”.
I called Shulan in the days following the talk to unpack this. After clarifying that he now spends “about even amounts of time with collectors and artists”, he says his approach has changed somewhat, particularly in the three years since Lomex expanded to two spaces on the same Downtown street.
“I spent the first four or five years spending very little time with collectors except at art fairs, occasionally having dinner with them or talking to them about my programme,” he says. Engaging more intensively, he adds, has not only helped commercially but also deepened his understanding of aesthetics and his responsibilities to his artists within the broader ecosystem.
“There’s a radically different set of concerns between the spectator-collector
public, the academic audience and the audience of artists,” he says. “Ideally, my role is to be someone who imparts wisdom from those different networks to the benefit of each of them.”
Unbalanced equation
Emma Fernberger, who founded Fernberger gallery in Los Angeles in 2024 after a combined nine years as a director of New York’s Bortolami Gallery and Ross+Kramer—emphasises the practical realities. “Gallerists are the fulcrum between people who buy art and people who make art,” she says. “Ideally you would spend equal amounts of time with each, but I don’t work with that many artists, and I have to be in touch with a ton of people who buy art. It’s a fundamentally unbalanced equation.”
Kendra Jayne Patrick can empathise. She premiered her eponymous gallery as a nomadic project in 2017 before committing to a permanent space in Bern, Switzerland in 2022, and recently recognised a strategic change was in order—even if it might risk creating friction once she expands beyond the five artists she currently represents.
“I had a revelation last year that my programme is good, but that I have to show people this. And that means spending more time on marketing and partying and kicking it with people who need to fund it,” she says. The ultimate goal, Patrick adds, is to inspire appreciation of her artists’ contributions to art history—an especially time-consuming project given how “skittish” many collectors have become in this uneven market.
For Martin Lilja, who co-founded Loyal Gallery in Stockholm with his partner Amy Giunta in 2005, there has been one constant amid many evolutions. “The artists are the reason why we do this—the artists and the relationships—and the time spent with them hasn’t gone down,” he says.
Although the duo’s bonds with collectors “aren’t entirely different” from those with their artists, they have proven to be more variable. “You come in and out of cycle with collectors. There are always new, exciting relationships for them, and new art to explore,” Lilja says.
Becoming bilingual
Ultimately, perhaps having no choice but to wrestle with the complications is what makes a rising dealer flexible enough to survive in the 21st century.
Fernberger says: “Some gallerists work in large machines, where they only have to deal with collectors—and that’s great because they do not speak ‘artist’. And some people in those machines only speak ‘artist’, and thank god they don’t have to deal with collectors, because that’s not their strength.
“If you’re in a small operation, then you have to be bilingual. There’s just no other way around it.”
