Critical Research Journal

This week we watched an interview with Francesca Genovese who is the director at Francesca Maffeo Gallery. Through the interview Francesca gave some good tips and the dos and don’ts when approaching a gallery, I will bullet point them below:

• Firstly send an email, make sure it is personal to the gallery receiving it don’t just blanket canvas. Make sure within the email you have researched the gallery and you know it’s right for your work. Francesca said she prefers a PDF of a project, so she can print it off and save for later if she doesn’t have anything for you right now. Website link can be included but sometimes a website can be out of date or full of content that the gallery is not interested in.
• Francesca then discussed the importance of meeting the artist face to face, to see if a working relationship can be established. This could be a lengthy process of coming in and chatting about your work before your work can be exhibited at the gallery, her point being it doesn’t just happen overnight.
• Pricing and editioning is different from artist to artist, different valuables such as where has this been published, how much research went into it and if they are a well-established artist are factors to be considered. Importance of editions will also reflect in the price, never decrease your price but you can always increase it.
• Francesca then discussed how she curates a project for an exhibition, she then continues to support artist with marketing and media. Also she enjoys when an artist comes in and updates regularly, where they are within their project.
• Artists that feature at Francesca’s gallery were also discussed https://www.francescamaffeogallery.com/artists/

I wasn’t so sure how editions/ open editions worked so I did google search to clarify that, and Agora Gallery did just that for me https://www.agora-gallery.com/advice/blog/2016/05/24/making-limited-edition-prints/

This was a great insight in how a gallery should be approached and how it works. I think for me this is something I would be interested in for the future. I’m not sure how long I will be able to work as a photographer full time, I wouldn’t want to do commercial projects, but I certainly will want to work on projects that could potentially work in a gallery market.