#delphiangallery

by Gala Knörr

When I finished reading ‘Navigating The Art World: Professional Practice for the Early Career Artist’ by Delphian, I started formulating ideas for this short essay and sensed the impending ominous feeling of having jumped the fence of that age where you are considered a grown human being and supposed to have all your life together, an artist in their mid-thirties. All aboard to real adulthood! Yet you also realize that the career that you embarked yourself in, is a lifelong pledge to your work, boiling it down slowly to its core, and its most flavourful fruits show up along a road where your permanently tested patience is tied to your growth, an acceptance of seasons of chaos, a mastery of rejection, and a community of like minded individuals within a world that is mudded by the often precarious nature of being a young(ish) artist. 

Truth is I graduated in 2007 from a BFA program at Parsons Paris, unaware that some of my classmates were the offspring of powerful well known figures of the cultural industry, armed with the mentorship and know-how to navigate the following stages of one’s career. We were in the midst of the peak years of the Myspace era, the beginnings of a post-collegiate Facebook being introduced into a global audience, shaping what social media is today, and unleashing the incessant forms of marketing and e-commerce strategies of the current multiple social networks of the Internet. I left with a BFA diploma in my pocket, a hand full of insane life changing experiences that up until today have proven to be valuable, but when I opened the door to my family’s home in Spain the 2008 market crash happened, and realized I had no clue what I was supposed to do next, but keep making work. I didn’t live in the city I studied in anymore, I returned to my home country and I was so far removed from the young emerging art scene there, the natural progression for me was to invest in my education and moved to London to earn my MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. I was in London one of the most culturally effervescent cities of the EU (Brexit meh), but even though I was in a context of artistic osmosis and formed a strong group of heterogenous artist friends, I was in a very demanding city. I did not have an instruction manual, and the friends I knew whose career seemed to be blooming I erroneously compared myself to, while I worked odd jobs such making PSAs with celebrities, DJing gigs, appearing as an extra in films, sold clothing, served drinks at openings, taught children’s workshops, gave guided tours and gallery assisted at Saatchi Gallery. After a while, a few pints, conversations and twisted changes of fate, I seemed to have stopped caring about the outside and decided to focus on the inside. 

My emotional stability, bank account and studio were waiting for me to believe in myself, I quit my day job (that was a bit dramatic), turned thirty, and those years I seemed to have blindly stroll through my career aimlessly, had actually been extremely formative. Social media became part of the pivotal change in my practice, and I don’t mean how well my work and studio practice were portrayed on the gram, I mean the actual act of it, the performance behind it, particularly how it has shaped us all. But it was the Hedley Roberts’ text towards the end of Delphian’s book that resonated so much with my personal experience. I never really had a mentor in university, in fact a tutor I worked with refused to write me a letter of recommendation to further my studies, a big slap in the face that only fed my drive to pursue my career. Recently, I invited my friend Paco Marcial to chat with the artists participating in the Adhesivo Magazine Digital Residency during lockdown. Marcial worked alongside Jason Rhoades as his studio manager for many years, and he said something that stuck with me and echoes Roberts’ sage advice in the book, ‘one must find people from their own generation to work and build oneself, those who know how to understand you’. After studying the work of many artists I admired, one random London day I met an artist who like me was hispanic, born in the eighties and making work I deemed meaningful, I asked this stranger to get a coffee at the Royal Academy one day, and for an hour and a half I had a conversation that helped me focus not only on my work but how I made it, gaining me a pal I still call a friend to this day. As Hedley says ‘If you know what kind of artist you want to be and you’ve documented and written about your work…and you’ve got nothing in the pipeline for next year. What are you missing? The answer is community.’