Notes on Setting Up a Gallery
Joss Cole - Cole’s Gallery, Leeds Corn Exchange
At thirty-three, in 2019, the year before COVID, I was making paintings and working at a hotel bar. As part of the many events at the hotel, such as weddings, christenings, etc., there was invariably some attractively corn-fed acoustic solo act or accompaniment to the event.
This leads me to think that if all these guys with guitars can find venues to play and show off their stuff, a steady place to show the art must be available. I am lucky enough to know lots of brilliant, steady, and enthusiastic painters who need to get their work out there and should. So often, the end result of exhibiting the work after having made it is far too difficult a task.
So, my thinking became: What can I achieve with modest means, some savings, a very supportive network, a very lucky setup, but still limited beginnings? So my achievable goal was Cole’s Gallery, which started in Leeds Kirkgate Market. The original space was a small but aesthetically pleasing Victorian shop, three metres by three metres square, with a big window display area. Here it was possible to show small to medium works, but with little scope for openings, unless you are cheek to canvas. After just under three years, we moved to a larger space across the road at Leeds Corn Exchange, where we are now able to show lager works and have exhibition openings. These two striking Victorian buildings remind us of a time when the government used industrial and colonial money to fund large socialist projects and architecture. These were called ‘the people's markets in the 19th century, after all.
The beautiful community buildings with fiddly bits, carved stone, minarets, and gargoyles are still hubs for amazing characters, independent shops, and some notably weird people. These kinds of places are great for galleries as there is so much life, cheaper or subsidised rent, oddness, and inspiration for the art as well as the beauty of where they are set. It’s almost like relational aesthetics without putting on a soup kitchen for your Brooklyn loft friends. More like a real soup kitchen for artists that are nonconformist individuals or established or emerging artists (art school). I am very proud to say in our short and stuttering existence, we have shown work from John Moores, RCA and RA, homeless artists, drunk artists, international artists, and work from friends and people that bought me coffee or cake and laughed at my one joke.
I am quite confident this is exactly the same set up as the Gagosian Gallery.
All the literature about running galleries claims that location does not really matter; it’s more about the mailing list. This is certainly true for sales and promoting your own practice, but a good spot is also fun for finding things to paint.
For example, when you are standing under a giant ornate red, green, and gold commercial Victorian cathedral and a man with his trousers down by his ankles is stealing a pallet of Easter eggs, meanwhile, an elderly woman is flirting in order to convince you to cut up cardboard boxes for her handbag, (for reasons that will never be known); it is easy to be forced into inspiration. Running the gallery in Leeds Kirkgate Market was a lot like renting a space in Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row, or Dylan Thomas's ‘Under Milkwood’ or Eliot's ‘Waste Land’. It was great!
We opened in the spring of 2019, quite possibly the worst time to start anything, as by the time we had put on a few shows and turned the corner into 2020, we had to close for COVID, on and off for a year, as you will remember fondly. My gallery benefited a great deal from the COVID grants. We however, were not asking for money like shady tories from our friends in the home office.
Ironically, it was all a socialist stimulus support policy by a conservative government to help small businesses. But we at Cole’s Gallery are transparent, like the girls at ‘White Pube’, tell us we should strive to be. I was only able to run the gallery because I have a wife and parents who love art who continue to be very supportive of the gallery. In order to make your art work and show it in many ways, you have to think selfishly or believe in it, or it won't happen. Be an artist, set up exhibitions run a gallery, and apologise later; that's the only way, and hopeful when you do, whoever it is looks back at you with an inquisitive, concerned look, like, ‘Why are you apologising?’.
At the time of writing, after five years, it is possible that our luck will run out for our physical space, but like many other spaces, free-wheeling galleries often ride off into the Whistler nocturne. They are remembered in blurry nostalgia and irritation; they did not show your work, showed it badly, did not sell it, or owed you money. Hopefully, we are achieving some of that nostalgia and keep moving on with the ambition of the Focus section of Frieze London and the reality of a market, or maybe we can be really cool and start an elite painterly app.
The next question connected to showing work yourself or through setting up or engaging with galleries is:
What do galleries want? They probably want work that supports their personal ethos or ego. Works that make the gallery look good, work that attracts other people who are impressed or intrigued. If it’s a good gallery, they will not care that work sells well in one way, because all sorts of things sell well. What you hope for are paintings that sell well and make the curator and galleries look smart. Glittery David Bowie stencils will always be popular, but you look like a moron claiming they are smart and interesting.
I am nostalgic for those art groups of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, you know the geographical ones, like Cornwall, Lamorna Cove, St. Ives, The Glasgow Boys, The Camden Town Group, or that cockney guy in Spain with the world, his wife, and Hemingway. These artists all made work that meant stuff, made in beautiful places, and some of the paintings were beautiful and some of it was ugly, but they made it together, fucking and arguing about formalist things, triangles or squares, Augustus John’s Dick or Gwen John’s chairs, that type of thing. So make a circle, coven, gang, band, or artist group that can help exhibit work and challenge the work; ‘it takes a tribe to raise a gallery’.
Joss Cole, Cole’s Gallery.