How to manage a gallery team of three to ten people

01The three-person threshold: the end of informality

When a gallery operates with one or two people in addition to the founding dealer, the organisation remains largely informal. Everyone knows what they have to do, tasks are distributed naturally, communication happens in real time and decisions are made on the spot. This way of working, which depends on proximity and shared assumptions, stops functioning once the team reaches three people. At this threshold, misunderstandings emerge, responsibilities overlap and information begins to get lost between team members.

Galerie Kamel Mennour, which has grown gradually since opening on rue Mazarine in Paris in 1999, went through this structuring phase like every developing gallery. Moving from craft to management means formalising what previously worked tacitly. This begins with clear role descriptions, even if they remain simple: who is responsible for artwork logistics, who manages collector relations, who coordinates communications, who handles administration and accounting. This explicit division of duties eliminates the grey zones that are the main source of frustration in small teams.

The dealer must also introduce formalised communication moments. A weekly meeting of around thirty minutes, on Monday morning for example, allows each team member to know what the others are doing, flag urgent matters and coordinate the week's tasks. This discipline, which may seem unnecessary in a small organisation, proves indispensable for maintaining cohesion and preventing each person from working in isolation without visibility of the whole.

02The five-person milestone: the need for a relay

At five people, the dealer can no longer supervise everything directly. The volume of daily decisions, the diversity of tasks and the number of interlocutors make hub-and-spoke management, where everything passes through the founder, physically impossible. The dealer who tries to maintain this model beyond five people ends up becoming a bottleneck that slows the entire organisation.

The solution involves identifying one or two relays within the team. This may be a gallery director, a head of sales or an exhibitions coordinator who takes charge of some operational decisions without the dealer needing to intervene on every detail. Galerie Perrotin, which now employs several dozen people worldwide, put this intermediate structure in place gradually, entrusting trusted collaborators with autonomous areas of responsibility.

This transition requires the dealer to accept letting go of certain aspects of their activity. A head of sales who independently manages relationships with some collectors may make decisions the dealer would not have made in exactly the same way. This difference is not only acceptable but desirable: it enriches the gallery's approach and frees the dealer for the tasks where their added value is greatest, namely artistic vision, relationships with artists and strategic decisions.

03The ten-person mark: structuring without bureaucratising

At ten people, the gallery enters a dimension requiring a genuine organisational structure. Roles must be clearly defined, processes documented, reporting lines established. The risk at this stage is tipping into a bureaucracy that stifles the creativity and agility that are a gallery's strengths. The dealer must find a balance between necessary structure and the flexibility essential to a cultural enterprise.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, which now has spaces in Paris, Salzburg, London and Seoul, has developed an organisation based on functional departments: sales, exhibitions, communications, logistics, administration. Each department has a head who reports to the founding dealer or general management, but who enjoys genuine autonomy in the daily running of their area. This model combines operational efficiency with a coherent artistic vision.

Process documentation becomes essential at this size. How to prepare an exhibition from start to finish, how to welcome a new collector, how to manage an institutional loan, how to organise fair participation: these processes, which previously existed only in the dealer's head, must be written down and shared so the team can work autonomously and consistently. This formalisation, which may seem tedious, is in fact liberating: it allows each collaborator to work without permanently depending on the founder's direction.

04Recruiting in the art world: sector specificities

Gallery recruitment follows particular dynamics. Specialised training in gallery management is rare, and the required skills combine very diverse competences: knowledge of the art market, aesthetic sensibility, commercial ability, administrative rigour, foreign language proficiency, capacity to handle the logistics of sometimes monumental works. It is rare to find all these skills in a single person, and the dealer must compose their team with attention to complementary profiles.

Word of mouth remains the primary recruitment channel in the gallery world. Recommendations from colleagues, artists, curators or collectors help identify candidates who already know the sector's codes and have proven themselves in other structures. Galerie Lelong and Galerie Nathalie Obadia have built their teams largely through co-optation, recruiting profiles from other galleries, auction houses or cultural institutions.

Internships and apprenticeships constitute a valuable pool for growing galleries. An intern who has spent six months in the gallery knows its workings, artists, collectors and culture. If they have performed well, recruiting them on a permanent contract represents a far smaller investment than integrating an external candidate who must learn everything from scratch. Many Parisian galleries operate on this model of progressive recruitment, which limits risk and allows compatibility to be validated before commitment.

05Retaining collaborators: a strategic challenge

High turnover is one of the recurring problems in galleries. Sector salaries often remain below those of auction houses or major luxury companies, and working conditions — extended hours during fairs, the stress of openings, the emotional weight of relationships with artists — can wear down even the most committed collaborators. A dealer who loses a key team member also loses the relationships that person built with collectors, the intimate knowledge of the programme and the expertise accumulated over the years.

Retention begins with recognition. A collaborator who feels valued, whose work is acknowledged publicly and whose opinion is sought on important decisions develops a sense of belonging that partially compensates for the salary limitations of the sector. Galerie Marian Goodman is known for the stability of its team, which is partly explained by the culture of respect and trust the founder established from the start.

Continuing education is another retention lever. A collaborator who learns, who progresses, who broadens their skills stays longer than one confined to repetitive tasks. Participation in international fairs, studio visits, meetings with artists and collectors forms part of this continuing education that enriches the collaborator and binds them more closely to the gallery.

Career progression prospects form the third pillar of retention. An assistant who knows they may become head of sales, then gallery director, projects their future within the organisation and more readily accepts present constraints. The dealer who offers no progression path for their team condemns them to seeking that progression elsewhere.

06Gallery culture: an essential intangible asset

Beyond organisational charts and processes, what makes a gallery team strong is its shared culture. This culture manifests in the way visitors are received, how works are discussed, how collector enquiries are handled, how the unexpected is managed and how the gallery is represented outside its walls. It reflects the founding dealer's personality and values, but it can only exist if it is shared and embodied by the entire team.

Galerie Almine Rech, which has opened spaces in several cities, has managed to maintain a coherent gallery culture despite the geographic distance between its various sites. This coherence rests on careful recruitment, sustained internal communication and regular gatherings that allow teams from different cities to know one another and share the same references.

Transmitting this culture to newcomers is a major challenge. A new collaborator must understand not only what the gallery does, but why and how it does it. A structured onboarding period, with meetings with each team member and immersion in the gallery's history, accelerates this cultural appropriation.

07Managing tensions and conflicts

In a team of three to ten people, tensions are inevitable. Physical proximity, workload, the pressure of fairs and openings, the strong personalities that populate the art world: everything conspires to create friction. The dealer who ignores tensions hoping they will resolve themselves makes a mistake that can prove costly in resignations, lost productivity and deteriorating morale.

The dealer must learn to hold difficult conversations. When a collaborator underperforms, when two team members enter open conflict, when a behavioural issue affects the collective, the dealer's responsibility is to intervene quickly and clearly. Naming the problem, hearing the parties, proposing a solution and verifying its implementation is a process that is simple in theory but demands courage and consistency.

Managing a gallery team is a profession within a profession, one that is learned and refined over time. The dealer who invests in their management skills builds a more solid, more sustainable and more attractive organisation, which in turn serves the quality of their artistic programme and the satisfaction of their collectors. Artedusa supports partner galleries in this professionalisation by offering a digital showcase that highlights the work of the entire team to an international collector audience.