Opening up to the international market as a french gallery

The answer is never the same twice. It depends on the business model, the solidity of the artistic program, the appetite for risk — and, often, on a confluence of circumstances that neither subsidies nor market studies could have anticipated.

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01Paris is no longer enough, and perhaps never was

France maintains an ambivalent relationship with its own art market. It possesses a dense institutional ecosystem — the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the FRACs, the CNAP —, a critical density rare in Europe, and a historical legitimacy built on more than a century of modernity. Yet according to the Art Basel/UBS 2023 report, France accounts for only 4% of the global contemporary art market, far behind the United States (45%), the United Kingdom (17%) and China (17%). Paris is a place of legitimation; it is rarely a sufficient place of sale for galleries seeking growth.

This structural imbalance explains why the most ambitious French galleries sought early on to position themselves elsewhere. Almine Rech opened in Brussels in 2008, then in London, New York and Shanghai. Thaddaeus Ropac — Austrian by birth but Parisian by adoption since 1990 — established his headquarters in Salzburg, London and Seoul. Templon, founded in 1966, now has spaces in Paris, Brussels and New York. This movement is not simply a race for size: it is a rational response to the geographical concentration of solvent collectors and prescriptive institutions.

The paradox, of course, is that Paris remains indispensable as a reference address. When David Zwirner opens a branch on rue de Miromesnil in 2019, when Pace settles in the Marais in 2021, it is precisely because the French capital retains a symbolic authority that New York or London cannot entirely replace. Being Parisian is an asset — provided one does not become a prisoner of it.

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02Fairs as the first school of export

For a gallery that does not yet have the financial solidity to open a permanent space abroad, international fairs represent the first learning ground — and the first major line of expenditure. Participating in Art Basel Hong Kong costs between 50,000 and 200,000 euros all in (booth, artwork transport, insurance, team travel), depending on the size of the rented space and the value of the works presented. Art Cologne, Artissima in Turin or ARCO Madrid remain more financially accessible, with budgets that can come down to around 20,000 to 30,000 euros for a mid-sized gallery.

What fairs provide goes well beyond the immediate transaction. They serve to map a market, identify collectors, and test the reception of an artistic program within a different cultural context. Several directors of French galleries describe the same sequence: a first participation at Frieze London without significant sales, followed by a second edition where the contacts made the previous year finally materialize. The fair is a relational investment as much as a commercial one.

The selection of fairs deserves a genuine strategy. Not all fairs are equal for all programs. A gallery specializing in fine art photography will gain more from being present at Paris Photo — whose edition at the Grand Palais Éphémère draws an audience of museums and institutional collectors — than at a second-tier generalist fair. A gallery carrying a contemporary African program will find in 1-54, in London or New York, an ecosystem of specialized collectors that no other platform assembles as effectively.

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03Models of expansion: from subsidiary to partnership, via franchise

Opening a permanent space abroad is the weightiest decision — and the most irreversible. Setup costs for a gallery in New York frequently exceed one million euros, between the prohibitive rents of Chelsea or the Lower East Side, renovation costs, and the recruitment of a local team capable of operating autonomously. London, since Brexit, has added a layer of administrative complexity (VAT, customs formalities for works in transit) without the rents of Mayfair or Fitzrovia having dropped significantly.

Faced with these obstacles, several French galleries have favored alternative models. A partnership with a foreign structure makes it possible to share costs and benefit from immediate local grounding. Galerie Lelong, which has represented artists such as Ana Mendieta and Cildo Meireles from Paris, has long maintained reciprocal relationships with American and Latin American galleries — an informal network that facilitates artwork loans, collector sharing and co-produced exhibitions.

The Carré d'Artistes model deserves a separate mention. Founded in Avignon in 2001, this commercial gallery chose to expand through franchising, with local partners in around twenty European cities (Brussels, Haarlem, Luxembourg, Stockholm). The concept rests on a standardized offer — original works in the 500 to 10,000 euro range, dense hanging, a welcoming space — that franchisees adapt to their market while benefiting from a central purchasing structure and a recognized brand. It is a model far removed from the contemporary art gallery in the strict sense, but it demonstrates that an international growth logic can work without massive capital or centralized risk-taking.

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04Asia: the mirage and the reality

The rise of the Asian market since the 2000s has exerted a powerful pull on French galleries. The opening of Art Basel Hong Kong in 2013 made tangible what many had sensed: Asian collectors, long regarded as second-tier buyers, had become structuring players in the global market.

Perrotin Hong Kong, opened in 2012 — a full year before the launch of Art Basel HK — illustrates this early wager. The gallery represented artists such as Takashi Murakami, whose popularity in East Asia was already enormous, but also Western artists that the local clientele was discovering. The strategy was not to transplant the Parisian program wholesale, but to rearticulate it around local sensibilities while maintaining curatorial coherence.

Almine Rech followed a different path in Shanghai, where she opened in 2019 by relying on a partnership with collector and entrepreneur Qiao Zhibing. This type of alliance — a European gallery bringing legitimacy and an artist network, paired with a local player bringing knowledge of the terrain and relationships with collectors — is arguably the most realistic model for galleries that do not have Perrotin's resources.

The Asian reality, however, is more nuanced than success stories suggest. Censorship remains a serious operational constraint in mainland China: subjects as varied as nudity, the representation of political figures, or certain readings of recent history can result in an exhibition being shut down by administrative order. Several galleries have chosen to concentrate their presence in Hong Kong or Seoul, which offer more legally predictable environments.

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05The financial and institutional tools that few galleries actually use

The CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques) offers a device that is frequently underused: a flat grant of 16,000 euros intended to fund partnerships between French galleries and foreign structures. This amount obviously does not cover the full cost of an international expansion, but it can finance a first prospecting mission, a co-produced exhibition, or the legal fees involved in establishing a partnership agreement. The review procedure stretches over several months; anticipating lead times is essential.

Business France, the public agency dedicated to the internationalization of French companies, also offers support specifically tailored to the cultural sector — market studies, introductions to local networks, collective participation in fairs. The Institut Français, for its part, holds mobility grants for represented artists, which can ease the logistical burden on a gallery wishing to bring its artists into an international context.

On the fiscal side, establishing a presence in certain markets requires structuring one's legal entity with care. In the United States, forming an LLC in the state of Delaware remains the most common solution for European galleries, owing to the fiscal flexibility and relative administrative simplicity of this structure. In Asia, arrangements vary by country: Hong Kong offers an attractive fiscal environment, while mainland China imposes specific host structures for foreign investments in the cultural sector.

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06What the digital changes — and what it does not

The 2020 pandemic accelerated a transformation that some galleries had been cautiously initiating for several years: online sales moved from gimmick to necessity. Platforms such as specialist online platforms or Artland allow a Parisian gallery to reach collectors in Los Angeles, Tel Aviv or São Paulo without heavy physical commitment. David Zwirner pushed the logic further by launching "Platform," a marketplace integrating third-party galleries and generating significant revenue as early as 2021.

For French galleries, the digital offers a lever for internationalization at a low entry cost, but it does not replace the physical relationship with the collector. Works of art are objects that need to be seen, sensed — or at least perceived in their actual presence before a significant purchase decision is made. Online viewing rooms work for photographic prints or editions, considerably less well for a large-format painting with a six-figure price tag.

What the digital does transform in a lasting way, however, is prospecting and the maintenance of relationships. WeChat for Chinese clientele, KakaoTalk for Korean, Instagram as a global showcase: these tools have redistributed the conditions of access to foreign collectors without abolishing the necessity of physical presence — at a fair, in a local institution, or at a dinner organized at the home of a key collector.

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07What globalization does to a gallery's identity

There is a real tension, rarely named openly, between international expansion and curatorial coherence. Galleries that develop too rapidly risk diluting precisely what made them singular. Chantal Crousel, founded in 1980 in Paris, made a radically different choice from Perrotin: no permanent space abroad, a hyper-focused program built around artists such as Taryn Simon, Wade Guyton and Monika Sosnowska, a selective presence at the most rigorous fairs. This deliberately embraced strategy of rarity is a form of internationalization, one in which reputation circulates rather than square footage.

The debate between expansion and depth runs through the entire sector. The mega-galleries such as Hauser & Wirth or Gagosian have demonstrated that a massive physical presence generates a visibility and access to institutional collectors that nothing else can replicate. But the question of artistic control — of the capacity to defend a coherent program across ten spaces simultaneously — remains fully open.

For a French gallery of intermediate size — say, between 500,000 and 3 million euros in annual turnover — the realistic path is probably neither retreat to Paris nor imitation of the Zwirner model. It is a measured expansion, built on solid partnerships, activated first through fairs and then, progressively, through more permanent presences in places where collectors and institutions have demonstrated lasting interest. Seoul, Mexico City and Lisbon are currently the markets drawing the most attention from galleries in their exploratory phase — three cities where costs remain manageable and where the competition of mega-galleries has not yet fully asserted itself.

The art world has been global for a long time. What is changing is that this globality is now within reach of structures that do not necessarily have the means of a multinational — provided they know precisely why they are venturing out, and what they are hoping to find there.