Sydney Gallery shuts its doors

"A couple of days ago an email arrived in the Art Life inbox from friendly
GrantPirrie director Tony Stephens that began with the rather startling statement:

"I am writing to let you know that I will be leaving Grantpirrie Gallery. As I am sure you have heard, Bridget [Pirrie] and Stephen [Grant] have decided to close the gallery at the end of the year. With this knowledge I have tendered my resignation - giving me time to work on new ventures and explore opportunities for 2012..." "

http://theartlife.com.au/?p=5522
 

I had first heard a rumour that an important Sydney Gallery was closing down about a month ago, ironically from another art dealer. He wouldn’t say which Gallery it was and I couldn’t really guess. Whilst artist run spaces tend to come and go on a regular basis, the bigger more important commercial galleries tend to last as long as the director does. There however been a few exceptions over the last decade or so, before now the most recent and in some ways most shocking was the closure of the extremely successful and important Kaliman Gallery. Despite having a huge amount of commercial success and critical acclaim, the financial backer behind the gallery went bankrupt, effectively pulling the pin on the gallery site and backing. The dealer himself, Vasilli Kaliman upped and left for Melbourne to start a new gallery there.

This time around it was only via a link on a friends page on Facebook that I saw the news that Grantpirrie was closing. The Facebook friend is the critic and arts personlaity Andrew Frost who had posted a link to the ABC program ArtLife's blog. Grantpirie was a fairly recent gallery, part of the new and trendy Redfern gallery precint. It was a professional, internationally renowned gallery which specialised in cutting edge contemporary Australian art. Whilst the reason it shut is now fairly obvious the implications may not be.

For artists its one less gallery to show at, it also means that there will now be a few dozen more established artists looking for a new gallery, making it even harder for an unknown up and coming artist to find a spot in a commercial gallery. It highlights the fragile nature of the art world and the existence of an artist within this. The artist is after all somewhat reliant on the gallery to sell and promote their work. The well being of the gallery is crucial to the artist success. Herein lies another reason for an artist to choose carefully the gallery which they intend to approach with an exhibition in mind. The idea is that a gallery will show the work and then continue to promote and store it until the next exhibition. Potential buyers will be able to access the work via the gallery website and storeroom. Further buyers will come to associate the artist with the gallery and vice versa. The buyer will know where to watch for new work from the artist and the artist will have access to the galleries list of collectors. Remove the gallery from this equation and more often then not the artist is forced to start from scratch. Depending on what stage of their career they are at this can be devastating.