How Small Galleries Are Evolving to Face the Challenges of 2024

Small galleries—often embedded in the heart of their local art communities—play a crucial role in finding and incubating emerging talent. Jonny Tanna, co-founder of the London-based alternative art fair Minor Attractions and founder of the buzzy North London gallery Harlesden High Street, emphasizes that these spaces give collectors direct access to local art scenes.“We have our ears to the streets,” he said, underlining the intimate quality of small galleries. This proximity allows them to spot and nurture new artists before they hit the mainstream. “We know what’s coming up and what’s happening,” he added.

Still, this advantage is coupled with the challenge of standing out in a crowded field. “For any small gallery, making sure that your programming is exciting and finding the right artists and finding something that’s not derivative is a challenge in itself,” he noted. Tanna advocates for a measured approach to gallery management, cautioning against the rush to participate in high-profile events such as fairs. Instead, he encourages a focused commitment to cultivating and nurturing the artist roster.

“I advise other gallerists to take their time because everybody wants to squeeze into these fairs, where everybody stands on ceremony, and nobody goes by reputation,” Tanna said. “I built this space to get away from all of that. I built this space to not be part of the art world and just enjoy art. It’s thankfully finally slowly paying off for us….We don’t focus on press. We don’t focus on all sorts of obvious things. We focus on our program and our artists.”

Likewise, Soo Choi, founder of Seoul’s P21, an experimental gallery comprised of two ultramodern glass cube showrooms, builds upon Tanna’s approach, expressing concerns about the tricky balance between sustainable business and growth. The challenge, as Choi notes, lies in scaling up without compromising the gallery’s core values or financial health. “I question how big I want to grow my gallery,” Choi said, noting the challenges of balancing a sustainable budget with a bigger artist roster and a bigger staff.

“Nowadays, that is the biggest question I have,” Choi said. “Whether it makes sense to become bigger and grow the gallery into [a] bigger organization with more staff, more artists, then how sustainable is it going to be? That would mean bigger overhead, but then also would it be possible to manage artists myself?”

Small galleries operate like any small business and resultingly face similar challenges. With rising inflation a global economic theme of the past few years, these local galleries are risking a lot more to host presentations at home and internationally.

Soaring rental prices in major art capitals like New York and London continue to pose a threat to the physical spaces, which was starkly evident in the second half of 2023, when a series of gallery closures rippled through Tribeca in New York. And, according to Artsy’s Art Industry Trends 2023 report, 66% of gallerists who sell a majority of primary-market works reported a rise in prices, either significantly or slightly, with inflation marked as the main factor for doing so.

Another knock-on effect of rising costs is participation in art fairs, which can be a crucial source of meeting new collectors for small galleries. Yet increasing a gallery’s global presence comes with significant overhead costs—and even more risks.

For P21’s Choi, participating in international art fairs is a necessary component for nurturing talent and the gallery itself. However, she admits the increasing difficulty that accompanies these high-risk presentations, especially as galleries face significantly lower returns.

“The biggest challenge is the huge cost of our international art fairs,” Choi said. “I was very lucky to get into major art fairs from very early on, but then I considered it as an obvious investment. But getting into these high-profile art fairs, we are pressured to make impactful presentations, and they are expensive, and they don’t necessarily sell enough at all—if at all—to cover the cost. So, these are huge risks and investments for us.”

These risks are especially prevalent when day-to-day overhead costs continue to increase, spanning from shipping costs to rent prices for the galleries’ brick-and-mortar. Karen Foss Becker, gallery director of Brigade in Copenhagen, emphasizes that balancing this budget is more time-consuming than ever.

“You have to love risk to be in this business because everything is so uncertain,” Becker said. “Of course, try to strategize and try to predict things, but it is just very risky because there are so many high costs and overhead costs to have a space. Also, when you’re trying to be international, [you] have high shipping costs and these overlying financial things that you have to be on top of all the time.”

One prevailing byproduct of the pandemic is the heightened online accessibility across the art world. Buying art online is now a firmly established channel for galleries and collectors. Artsy’s Art Collector Insights 2023 report found that 80% of collectors surveyed had bought art online in the past year, and in Artsy’s Art Industry Trends 2023 report, 51% of galleries said that online collectors are primarily new to their business. Finn Schult, the co-director of HEIRESS in St. Petersburg, Florida, opened his gallery after the pandemic and believes the digital realm helped propel the gallery’s presence across the planet.

“I’d like to think that these relationships today are more able to breach the confines of location than they used to be,” Schult said. “With the help of the digital realm, it’s not uncommon for us to work with artists and collectors that live on the other side of the globe, which is honestly crazy, considering the fact that it wasn’t all that long ago that that type of gallery/client or gallery/artist relationship wasn’t even close to fathomable for a small gallery in Tampa Bay.”

However, these online connections are a new territory for most small gallery owners. For instance, Vincent Chen, the owner of Artnutri Gallery in Taichung City, Taiwan, noted that today, small galleries have to leverage social media and online platforms to reach collectors effectively. Chen noted that collectors can buy art far more easily than in years past, so increasing digital strategies has become a crucial way to stay relevant.

“Collectors have more choices; artists also can look for galleries from social media or other art platforms to exhibit their works. For our gallery, we can easily invite artists through email or Instagram,” Chen said. “We don’t need to meet each other face to face.”