Art Exhibitions – are they a necessary evil?
These are the questions I keep asking myself as I get ready for my first ever exhibition at Hillier & Skuse Gallery on the Gold Coast. I have never really been able to get a large enough body of work together to hold my own exhibition but this has come along and there will be around 27 different artists all exhibiting in the same gallery. This has given me the opportunity to try an exhibition out with my limited number of works and see if it pays off. The cost for a 2mtr wall space is $300 along with the gallery keeping 20% of all sales. Now as I am new to this I am not sure if this was a good deal or not but I am thinking it is, although time will tell if many people actually visit the exhibition. What sold me on being part of this is it is running for nearly a 3 month period across christmas and is at a gallery in the queensland tourist capital of the Gold Coast. With the large amount of artists involved in the exhibtion also comes a large amount of their family and friends that will visit plus each individual artist should be doing there own marketing campaign. It is also going to be marketed by the great art tv show “Colour in your Life” so with all these pluses i would expect plenty of visitors through the door.
Now I volunteer at another Art Gallery local to me and the price for hiring it out is $150 per week. So over the same amount of time as the gold coast exhibition the cost would build up to be much higher. I know that this price if for the entire gallery but for someone like me who has really only been painting seriously for a couple of years then my body of work is not big enough to fill an entire gallery space. Actually another bonus with this Gold Coast gallery is that we can change our paintings throughout the course of the exhibition which not only helps out the artist to get more work hung but also makes it more exciting for visitors.
The only downside I can see is that my work is possibly tied up for a long period and if nothing sells i am out of pocket $300. But in saying that I have no other plans for my work to be hung elsewhere anyway and hopefully it will be worth $300 just for getting my name out there a bit. I know I will have plenty of business cards on hand with all my details and links to social media etc.
I think my biggest worry about signing up for this and over the period of the exhibition is to be able to produce enough works. I really don’t want the same work hanging in my space for the entire 3 months and if by chance any of my pieces sell, I need to make sure i can replace them. So if anything, this will actually give me a kick up the arse to get more work finished and out the door.
I will keep you all posted with how I go with this as a first time exhibitor. Any questions or if you have any tips for me just leave a comment below. I would love to hear your opinions on Art Galleries and Exhibitions.
Next week we will be looking at Reference images and what equipment I use etc.
Happy Painting 🙂
Kerri xx
A Brush With Nature 