Finding artists: The gallerist's eye in daily practice

It is this skill, this famous "eye," that gallerists guard so jealously. It is built over years, refined in studios, openings, art fairs, and art school corridors. But it also follows precise logics that can be decoded.

01What "having an eye" actually means in the trade

The term circulates in the art world with a faintly mystical aura, as though some people are born with the gift and others are not. The reality is more prosaic. The gallerist's eye is a combination of three things: an extensive visual culture, a thorough knowledge of the market, and an ability to evaluate not what an artist produces today, but what they will be capable of producing in ten years.

Marian Goodman, who opened her New York gallery in 1977 and has since represented Gerhard Richter, Tacita Dean, and Pierre Huyghe, takes on average only one or two new artists per year. This extreme selectivity is a deliberate strategy: every artist signed commits the reputation of the entire gallery. When asked about her criteria, she always speaks first of intellectual coherence — an artist's ability to articulate what they do, to understand its stakes beyond mere visual production.

David Zwirner, for his part, works systematically with art historians to contextualise the works he champions even before their public presentation. This academic approach is not ornamental: it shapes the way museums and institutional collectors receive an artist. A solo show at Zwirner is often the prelude to an acquisition by MoMA or the Tate.

02The hunt for talent: where and how it actually happens

Experienced gallerists maintain information networks that resemble those of an investigative journalist far more than those of a tradesperson. Studio visits remain the central tool — but knowing which studios to knock on requires constant, ongoing vigilance.

The major art schools are the first prospecting ground. The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Central Saint Martins in London, the Villa Arson in Nice, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris see hundreds of graduating students pass through each year — and every degree show is an opportunity for discovery. Some established galleries have formed formal partnerships with institutions: assistants are sent to degree shows, prizes are created, residencies are funded. Galerie gb agency in Paris, which represents artists such as Kader Attia and Ryan Gander, has built part of its programme on precisely this kind of connection with the academic world.

Artist residencies play an analogous role. The Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Gasworks in London, and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin function as accelerators of visibility. Njideka Akunyili Crosby — today represented by Victoria Miro, with works reaching several million dollars at public auction — built part of her initial network during a London residency, before American galleries opened their doors to her.

Emerging art fairs represent a third channel, often underestimated. NADA in New York, Liste in Basel, and Material Art Fair in Mexico City allow smaller galleries to present young artists in a context where buyers are expressly in discovery mode. For an established gallerist, walking the aisles of NADA is a way of taking the pulse of a generation still in formation.

03Instagram is not a shortcut, but a genuine tool for keeping watch

The role of social media in discovering talent is real, but frequently misunderstood. It does not work according to the romantic scenario of the unknown artist who posts their work and finds themselves courted by New York galleries the following day. It works as a tool for confirmation and surveillance.

Julie Curtiss, a French-American painter whose unsettling figurative work exploded in the early 2020s, was spotted by Anton Kern Gallery — a demanding New York gallery specialising in painting — through a combination of peer recommendations and a consistent Instagram presence. It was not an Instagram profile that convinced Anton Kern: it was the totality of a body of work that was visible, legible, and intellectually defensible. The platform had made that body of work accessible before any physical meeting had taken place.

Amalia Ulman goes further still: her project Excellences & Perfections (2014) was a conceptual performance deployed entirely on Instagram, which several galleries subsequently acquired and exhibited as screenshots. The platform was not the distribution channel for a work that existed elsewhere — it was the medium itself. It was Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin that first represented her.

What gallerists actually look at on Instagram is not the follower count. It is the coherence of an approach over time, the quality of how the works are documented, the accounts the artist follows and the artists they interact with — signals that together allow someone to be located within an ecosystem.

04The selection criteria: what gallerists don't say in public

Behind the formulas about "authenticity" and "vision," a professional gallerist's selection criteria follow a logic that is simultaneously artistic and commercial — one it would be naive to try to separate.

The coherence of the body of work is the first filter. An artist whose work jumps from one register to another in response to opportunities or passing influences cannot be defended over the long term. The narrative must hold, and hold over time. This is why Marlene Dumas — represented by Frith Street Gallery in London — has built an entire body of work around the portrait as political space, over decades, without ever yielding to the temptation to diversify.

The potential for institutional display then comes into the reckoning. A work that cannot enter a museum collection or travel in exhibition creates a genuine commercial constraint. The large-scale works of Richard Serra or Kara Walker impress collectors, but they require specific conditions of reception. Gallerists systematically assess whether an artist can produce work at multiple scales — small formats accessible to younger collectors as well as monumental pieces for institutions.

The artist's "narrative" — their story, their commitments, their declared influences — counts for more and more in a market where collectors are no longer content simply to buy an image but a position. The rise of Kehinde Wiley in the 2010s, driven by his reinterpretation of portraits from European classical painting with Black subjects, follows this logic precisely: the work is technically beyond reproach, and it says something urgent about the present.

05The gallery-artist relationship: a contract of mutual interests

The signing of a contract between an artist and a gallery is often perceived as an achievement. It is in reality the beginning of a complex relationship, whose terms define the balance of power for several years to come.

The 50/50 split on sales is the publicly stated norm — but it is negotiated. A gallery that invests heavily in the production of an exhibition (transport, fabrication, communications, catalogue) can lay claim to a larger share. Conversely, an artist whose market value is rising can renegotiate in their favour. Geographic exclusivity agreements allow galleries of different sizes to share an artist without competing directly: Perrotin can represent an artist in Asia while a New York gallery champions them on the American market.

The length of commitment ranges from one to five years, with tacit renewal clauses that warrant careful attention. Some artists have discovered, belatedly, that a gallery retained rights over their earlier catalogue even after the relationship ended. Transparency on these matters remains uneven across the sector, even though professional organisations such as the Société des auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques (ADAGP) in France and Artists' Rights Society in the United States advise artists on their rights.

06How art fairs have transformed the gallerist's time

Before the 1990s, a gallery lived primarily from its local exhibitions and its network of loyal collectors. The explosion of international art fairs — Art Basel at the fore, followed by Frieze, the former FIAC now reborn as Paris+ par Art Basel, and dozens of others — restructured both the professional calendar and the finances of the trade.

A mid-sized gallery participating in six or seven fairs per year spends between 150,000 and 400,000 euros on stands, transport, insurance, and staffing costs, according to industry estimates. These costs weigh heavily on smaller operations. The counterpart is an international exposure that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.

For emerging artists, a presence at an art fair — even in a section dedicated to young galleries such as "Emergence" at Paris+ — constitutes a signal of legitimacy. It is often at a fair that institutional directors, significant collectors, or other gallerists see for the first time an artist they had known only by name. The density of encounters is incomparable to anything a gallery exhibition can offer.

07What the great gallerists have in common beyond the eye

Looking at the trajectories of the major galleries — Goodman, Zwirner, Perrotin, Chantal Crousel in Paris, Sprüth Magers between Berlin and London — certain constants emerge that have nothing magical about them.

Patience, first. None of these galleries built their reputation on artists discovered and turned over quickly. The long-term relationship, sometimes spanning several decades, is what distinguishes a gallery from a speculator. Gerhard Richter has worked with Marian Goodman since the 1970s; that fidelity is a value in itself on the market.

Then the capacity to read the moment. Chantal Crousel began actively representing contemporary African artists — Kapwani Kiwanga, Tarek Atoui — well before the market caught up with those choices. This is not altruism: it is a reading of art history in the process of rewriting itself, and a position taken before demand accelerates.

Finally, the capacity to resist the temptation of consensus. The galleries that have lasted are those that championed artists nobody immediately understood — and that accepted the wait. This is perhaps the true criterion that distinguishes a gallerist from an art dealer: one sells what others want to buy, the other creates the conditions for others to want to buy what they have chosen.