The Glory of the Garden?

by Matt Price
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It's alright now Jon Jones 22cm x 22cm copyright the artist courtesy Park View Gallery	Queensway 2003 Alicia Dubnyckyj 4 x 3 ft copyright the artist, courtesy Artlounge	Synthesis 2003 Gail Troth acrylic on canvas, 97.5 x 172 inches, copyright the artist, courtesy St Paul's Gallery
All my failing's exposed (sic) Jon Jones 22cm x 22cm copyright the artist courtesy Park View Gallery	Pinfold 2003 Alicia Dubnyckyj 4 x 3 ft copyright the artist courtesy Artlounge	Synthesis (detail) 2003 Gail Troth acrylic on canvas 97.5 x 172 inches copyright the artist courtesy St Paul's Gallery

For artists living outside London, especially younger practitioners, the question of how to make a living, develop their careers and remain living outside London is a problematic one. Using Birmingham as an example, there are several directions that this essay could pursue to investigate the professional development of artists based in and around the city: the state of artist-led activity ; the roles of the public spaces in the city in supporting locally based artists ; the use of independent, temporary and for-hire spaces ; the contemporary arts related festivals ; the funding agencies' and arts organizations' approach to individual practitioners ; existing links between cities and the capital; or the relationship between exhibiting opportunities in Birmingham and the rest of the region's galleries . While all of these things are integral to a successful contemporary art scene, it is perhaps the absence of a developed commercial arts infrastructure combined with a coherent critical framework that separates cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds from London. Commercial gallery activity has been expanding, changing and developing rapidly in Birmingham in the last five years - a phenomenon that is perhaps illustrative of what has been happening in many major cities across England. Using three short case studies, this text sets out to examine some of these commercial galleries and the artists they represent.

The suburbs of Birmingham have benefited from the property boom of recent years, with a belt of towns arched around the city centre becoming increasingly desirable to a broad spectrum of ages and types of people. As with many other places, Moseley, Balsall Heath and Kings Heath are three neighbouring districts that have seen property prices rise significantly and luxury property developments crop up more and more, particularly since the mid 1990s. Park View Gallery was established in Kings Heath in 1998 and has expanded its premises into three modest exhibition spaces. Initially presenting more showcase group exhibitions, the gallery is increasingly focusing on solo shows as interest grows in many of the fifteen artists they currently represent. Ninety percent of the artists they show are based in the city and region, with roughly two thirds of them being under the age of 35. Most of their client base is from the local neighbourhoods and they are primarily a domestic market. Fetching prices of up to £1000, a significant proportion of the works they regularly sell are traditional landscapes and modern figurative and abstract works, though their range is wide and they are increasingly tapping into more discernibly contemporary markets.

One contemporary artist they represent is Jon Jones. Jones studied fine art at Leicester De Montfort in the early 1990s and now works in the design department at a secondary school in a Birmingham suburb. With a young family to support with his wife Tina, he has only recently begun exhibiting work again in the last two years. He has exhibited four times during this period and has sold virtually everything featured in the shows, as well as receiving a good number of private commissions. Working largely with portraiture, his small, attractive and quirky images exploring the cult of fame sell on average for £300 each. Invited to have an exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery this summer, Jones is one of only a small number of artists based locally to have an exhibition in a major public space in the city and to be selling locally on a regular basis. Like many fine art graduates, his need to earn a living meant pursuing a different career path, but unlike most, he has continued to produce his own works.

Artlounge is located in the Mailbox, a recent addition to the Birmingham skyline. The city centre complex hosts a number of boutiques, restaurants and bars, and in addition to being the new home of the BBC in Birmingham also contains a substantial number of luxury apartments. Opened in 2000, the Artlounge developed out of an art consultancy business. As well as having an expanding corporate client base, the gallery has benefited greatly from the city living culture that has been thriving since the mid-nineties. With over fifty artists on their books (of which around twenty regularly exhibit in the gallery), roughly a third of the artists they represent are based in Birmingham and the West Midlands. As approximately two thirds of their artists are under 35 years of age, Artlounge represents a considerable proportion of the emergent (and locally sellable) artists from the region.

Alicia Dubnyckyj is one of Artlounge's top-selling artists. Living in the suburbs of Birmingham, she graduated in 2001 with a BA in fine art from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design at the University of Central England (BIAD). Picked up by the gallery from her degree show, her stylized gloss paintings of cityscapes were initially selling for up to £1500. With a broad range of interest that crosses generational boundaries, she has developed a strong base of repeat customers and collectors as well as steady new interest in purchasing her work, and as a result, the prices her works command have more than tripled in two years. A line of limited edition prints has also proved highly successful. Having started an MA at the Royal College of Art, she has deferred completion in order to keep up with the commercial demand for her work. Now having solo exhibitions at the Artlounge up to twice per year, she is also represented by Sarah Myerscough Gallery in London. From the income generated through these two galleries (in addition to private and public commissions), Dubnyckyj is one of a very small number of young artists living in Birmingham who is able to earn a respectable living purely through sales of her work.

Another gallery that has emerged from urban regeneration, the growth in civic economic prosperity and the city living lifestyle is St Paul's Gallery. Opened at the beginning of 2003, it is heralded as the largest commercial gallery space outside London. Based in a purposely-renovated factory in the Jewellery Quarter (a district still very active in the jewellery and craft trades), the gallery sells old masters, modern masters and work by established contemporary artists (e.g Michael Craig-Martin, Julian Opie, Jason Brooks). One of the rooms is devoted purely to contemporary art, and feels like a more formally curated space than a mixed showcase. A large proportion of their stock is in limited edition prints, etchings and engravings, though a number of select originals are distributed around the spaces. The gallery has strong connections with several galleries and dealerships in London, and along with their considerable managerial and PR experience, the prices the work they exhibit can command range from £1000 to £20,000.

With a few months of business now under their belts, the gallery has just signed up the first artist that they will officially represent, an artist from Birmingham called Gail Troth. Having worked in jewellery design, commercial art and run her own business for a number of years, Troth enrolled with BIAD to pursue her interest in Fine Art and has recently graduated with 1st class Hons. Her current works on a zoological theme are quite remarkable, and if she has a body of work that lives up to these then her career prospects are very promising. St Paul's Gallery spotted her work at the degree shows and having featured some pieces in their current group show, will present a solo exhibition of her work in November of this year. What is particularly interesting about the gallery's approach was their decision to include some of her works in a group show alongside very established figures from the national and international art circuits. Even more interestingly, her works did not seem out of place.

Both suburban and city centre galleries are beginning to be able to spot talented artists at the end of their undergraduate and, in some cases, post-graduate studies, Markets from this source have only really begun to open up in the past few years, and significantly, they are often trans-generational markets for the same artist's works. This shift is primarily due to the social and economic climate that has developed in the city in the last five or six years. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that the large majority of people from the domestic markets in the West Midlands do not constantly keep up to date with the contemporary art world, it is equally apparent that these people are more aware of, informed about and interested in specifically 'contemporary' art than at any point in the past. This is in part due to the fact that contemporary art became fashionable again in the mid '90s, (to a large extent precipitated by the YBA generation), and the increased coverage in weekend papers, magazines and on the television has filtered through into more mainstream consciousness. Extensive and proc-active networks of young people from across the creative sectors are also important to the current momentum. It is also due to the effects of lottery money ploughed into the region: there is more good quality contemporary art being shown and with new buildings for Ikon and the New Art Gallery Walsall, art has become interwoven with the retail and property developments that have been the product of recent regeneration and European investment. All of these things are contributory factors to bringing contemporary art much more into the daily fabric of an urban centre such as Birmingham.

How far beyond the more mainstream domestic tastes can artwork represented by these galleries go? Gail Troth will be one of the first real tests of this. St Paul's Gallery suspects that her client base will be primarily corporate and public collections, not least due to the size of some of her current works, but also because they are idiosyncratic, challenging paintings. The next question is how well such galleries are able to assess and access different parts of the artworld when their client base isn't interested in purchasing works by an artist the gallery thinks has good potential. If Troth doesn't find a decent market in Birmingham or through the gallery's current client base, will the gallery be able to get her work into more appropriate contexts without having to lose her? St Paul's is currently the most likely gallery to be able to find such alternatives out of the three examples I have given because they have strong links with several commercial galleries and dealerships in London. Here it is a question of the relationships between regional commercial galleries and other parts of the contemporary art apparatus, whether through art fairs or the channels of public and independent galleries both here and abroad.

With the growth of these and other commercial galleries in the region, there is a need for greater critical visibility - something that seems to be severely lacking across all sectors of the contemporary arts in Birmingham. While coverage of artists represented by commercial galleries in Birmingham is increasingly prevalent in local and regional newspapers and magazines, it rarely extends further and is generally popular journalism rather than critical, academic writing. Virtually nothing is produced in-house or commissioned by the commercial galleries in the city, nor is there a strong enough critical infrastructure outside the gallery that is able to come in and play that role. Artlounge has just produced its first catalogue (for Dubnyckyj's current show), and while this is a good step forward, there is no critical essay included. St Paul's Gallery is also keen to generate catalogues and publications, but has so far not been in a position to produce them, and Park View Gallery is looking into the idea. Modest print runs of small, good quality catalogues or publications with a short, professional essay would surely be a step towards accessing parts of the national apparatus from which regional commercial galleries are currently cut off. Similarly, regular, professional critical attention from within (and beyond) the region is needed for the links between art colleges, artists, commercial galleries, public galleries and other arts organizations to really start functioning as a unified piece of machinery, as they seem to in London, and to some extent in Glasgow and Manchester. (This would perhaps also precipitate more arts writers in the region being published in national/international art magazines and journals.) One publication in Birmingham, Fusedmagazine, has been attempting to address this situation, and if it receives sufficient levels of advertising, funding and investment, promises to become an increasingly invaluable asset to the city and region . The printing wing of BIAD is also currently taking steps to improve the situation in terms of arts writing.

While major cities are unlikely to be able to command a commercial arts economy on a scale comparable to London, there is considerable room for growth. In many ways, it is the development of the regional commercial galleries that holds the key to the issue of the career development of artists based in the regions. If a regular, strong and nationally-connected critical machinery can be generated to work alongside these businesses (and the galleries themselves can nurture more national and international networks), then the two missing links will have been found that can really activate the regional arts economies - the circuit would be completed. In this way, there are likely to be better functioning channels for propelling artists to national and international status, as well as a greater chance of being able to keep a larger proportion of artists living in the city and their national/international sales staying within the region's economy. Gillian Wearing, Richard Billingham and George Shaw are all internationally established artists from the West Midlands (and all, coincidentally, have had major solo shows at Ikon in recent years). What is the likelihood of their counterparts from the next generation being represented by commercial galleries based in the region in fifteen years' time, or at the very least, passing through them on the way?