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Every young artist wants gallery representation. The details vary. Maybe it’s Gagosian. Maybe it’s Hauser & Wirth. Maybe it’s a scrappy gallery on Henry Street with a leaky roof and an owner who still installs every show themselves. The dream remains remarkably consistent: Someone believes in your work enough to put their name behind it. Ask artists what success looks like and, sooner or later, a gallery enters the conversation.
The strange thing is that, even as artists spend years chasing gallery representation, what the arrangement means remains surprisingly difficult to define. Ask a lawyer and they’ll talk about contracts. Ask a dealer and they’ll talk about partnership. Ask an artist and you’ll often hear something closer to hope.
When British artist Nigel Cooke cemented his relationship with his first gallery in 2002, he wasn’t imagining auction records or private jets. He simply wanted to stop teaching and avoid working in a warehouse. Making enough money from painting to support himself seemed ambitious enough. The gallery was Stuart Shave/Modern Art, then a young outfit operating out of a converted storefront in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood. More established galleries weren’t interested. Joining Stuart Shave, Cooke told me, was a leap of faith.
The gamble paid off. Museums acquired his work. Curators came calling. Sales happened. The gallery’s and Cooke’s reputations grew along with it. Twenty-four years later, Cooke, now repped by Pace, just opened a dream show, “Bad Habits,” at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, which will run through November 22. Cooke was very clear with Pace that he wanted to be a part of the Biennale in some way and, after some relationship-building, the foundation invited him to become its first artist-in-residence, giving him a studio inside the historic palazzo where he created a new series of paintings inspired by the city and its lagoon.
By most measures, the system worked. Yet one of the most thought-provoking things Cooke told me in a recent interview was that galleries rarely have the kind of long-term roadmap artists imagine they do.
“When you’re young, you think you’ve joined some hallowed brigade,” he said, of finally getting representation. The assumption is that somebody is now looking after you. But the reality, he said, is more complicated. Nobody really understands the entirety of an artist’s career. Galleries may have a strategy for the next exhibition or the one after that, but beyond that, Cooke said, “It’s a void.”
That observation came up repeatedly as I spoke to artists, dealers, and other art world operators about what it means to be represented by a gallery.
The romantic version of gallery representation is a familiar, if unlikely, linear progression: A dealer discovers an artist, believes in the work, introduces it to collectors, places it in museums, and thus builds a career. The commercial version is less glamorous. It involves consignments, commissions, payment schedules, inventory, storage, exclusivity agreements, and exit clauses. After all, at its core, gallery representation is an economic relationship.
Savannah Huitema, an attorney at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who advises both artists and galleries, told me that people on either side of the relationship ignore that reality at their peril. “It’s still a commercial system,” she said. “To pretend that doesn’t exist is a mistake.”
Artists tend to focus on what representation can do for them but pay less attention to what happens if the relationship ends. Some contracts contain termination provisions with lengthy “tails,” according to Huitema, allowing galleries to continue earning commissions long after an artist departs. Other agreements permit galleries to continue selling inventory they already hold. Nobody thinks much about the possibility of divorce when they’re getting engaged.
The funny thing is that dealers often describe representation in almost the opposite way. When I asked dealer Cristin Tierney what representation means, she didn’t start by talking about contracts. She started with the people. An artist in their 80s needs something different than an artist in their 30s. A sculptor requires different support than a video artist. One artist might want constant communication, while another wants to be left alone.
“It’s a partnership,” she told me.
That word came up again and again. Charlie Moffett, whose gallery has earned attention not just for top-notch programming but also for offering healthcare benefits to its artists, described representation less as a sales arrangement than a long-term commitment. Before formally adding artists to his roster, he spends years getting to know them. The goal isn’t simply to sell work but to determine whether the relationship will actually function.
His view is refreshingly straightforward: Galleries should help artists sell work. Artists should know when work sells, who bought it, and when they’ll be paid. That sounds obvious, but apparently it isn’t, according to Moffett, who told me that he’d heard stories of artists discovering at openings that collectors already owned their work before the artists themselves knew a sale had happened. In some cases, those artists were still waiting to be paid. You don’t need a law degree to understand why those relationships don’t last.
For artists, though, the value of representation often becomes clear only after they get it. Painter Sky Glabush spent years showing with smaller galleries before landing what he described as a career-changing opportunity with the now-defunct Stephen Friedman Gallery. Suddenly there were dedicated sales teams, communications staff, artist liaisons, showings at art fairs, and introductions to collectors around the world.
The traditional sales split between a gallery and an artist is 50–50. Some artists bristle at that division—Glabush doesn’t. The way he sees it, half of something is a lot better than all of nothing. Before joining a larger gallery, he said, he could spend the same amount of time and energy making an exhibition and reach a relatively small audience. With a bigger operation behind him, that same effort suddenly reached a wide network of collectors, curators, institutions, and critics around the world. As Glabush put it, “100 percent of zero is zero.” The question isn’t how much a gallery takes. It’s whether the gallery is creating value that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
“You put almost the same amount of energy into any exhibition,” Glabush told me. “But when you do an exhibition in a place like [Stephen Friedman], where there is this huge team behind you, all of your efforts get amplified.”
The experience also showed him how large-scale galleries operate. Most dealers tend to focus on sales. Artists often focus on exhibitions. Once he learned about Friedman’s impending closure, Glabush decided to look for something more subtle. He effectively auditioned several interested galleries before settling on Alison Jacques in London, who represents him now. His career up to that point had made him realize the importance of something many young artists don’t give a second thought to: curatorial vision, placement, documentation, and context. Jacques’s curatorially focused program was exactly in line with what Glabush was looking for in a gallery.
A good dealer, he said, protects artists from a market that can sometimes be self-destructive. They stop prices from rising too quickly. They place work with collectors who are likely to keep it rather than flip it. They make sure the work is photographed properly because those images may become the permanent record of a painting long after it leaves the studio. Most importantly, they provide context. The best galleries don’t simply sell art but help explain why it matters to collectors and museums.
That may also explain why, in recent years, many artists have turned to the growing field of advisers and agents. Firms like Andrea Glimcher’s Hyphen, 291 Agency, founded by Gagosian veteran Max Teicher, and the Artist Legacy Bureau, founded by former Hauser & Wirth partner Christopher Canizares, were formed in response to an art world that has become larger, more international, and more complicated. Their pitch is not that galleries have failed, but that artists need help navigating a rapidly growing system that now stretches across fairs, institutions, collectors, publications, and multiple continents.
What struck me after speaking with artists, dealers, lawyers, and advisers was how rarely anyone described representation as a destination. Cooke offered a useful analogy: The gallery world, he said, resembles a school system. Different institutions make sense at different stages of a career. A young artist might thrive with a small gallery. A mid-career artist supporting a family might need the resources of a larger one. Later in life, they may find themselves drawn back toward a smaller gallery where the owner still visits the studio and knows every collector by name.
The mistake is believing that getting represented means the uncertainty disappears. Uncertainty is endemic to a career in the arts. Gallery representation can open doors. It can put work into museums. It can introduce artists to curators, collectors, critics, and institutions. It can transform a career. What it cannot do is guarantee one. That’s the part artists usually discover after they’ve gotten exactly what they wanted.
