Hip and High-Profile International Dealers Will Descend on Prague to Participate in a New Gallery Share Program

The gallery share model is expanding to a new city: Prague.

After two successful runs in Warsaw, the program known as Friend
of a Friend is launching in the Czech capital. It is just one more
sign of how these collaborative
arrangements—which started with Condo in New York and London,
followed by proyectosLA in Los
Angeles, Okey Dokey in Cologne,
and Various Others in
Munich—are increasingly becoming a popular option for galleries
seeking to increase visibility for their artists without the high
cost or high stakes of a full-fledged art fair.

The inaugural Prague edition will include 22 galleries, with
shows opening this weekend and running through October 8.
Participants include frequent guests on the gallery share circuit
like Kosovo’s hip dealership Lambdalambdalambda and
forward-thinking Polish outfit Galeria Stereo, as well as a few
surprising names, such as the high-profile international Galleria
Continua, a regular at megawatt fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach,
and the Wellcome Collection, a museum in central London. Galleries
hosting the visiting dealers include stone projects, SVIT and Zahorian & Van Espen.

Organizers of FOAF, who include Ewa Borysewicz, Zuzanna Hadrys,
Piotr Drewko, and Michael Lasota, originally developed the idea
after they asked to join the Condo franchise, but were turned down
because Condo has a one-per-continent rule. Unlike Condo, FOAF and
other regional gallery shares aim to generate heat in areas far
from art-market hubs like New York, London, and Shanghai.

Even after they developed FOAF in Warsaw, however, the group did
not anticipate they would franchise the program. “Our main
goal is to provide an international context for the gallery scene
in Warsaw, build new networks, and allow foreign guests—gallerists,
collectors, curators, and journalists—to get to know the art scene
of Poland’s capital,” they told artnet News in a statement.

However, their plans changed when Michael Manek, the founder and
owner of participating Prague gallery SVIT, became interested in
organizing a local version of FOAF after witnessing its warm
reception in Warsaw. The model has proven to be “a useful format
for building new networks and exchanging ideas between contemporary
art galleries,” the founders said. “Since it’s simple, it can be
easily applied to other scenes and cities.”

Moving forward, the founders don’t feel the need to limit
themselves to Eastern Europe. The Warsaw editions have included
galleries from Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Zurich, and London,
they note, and they are open to bringing it to other cities further
afield in the future.

The post Hip and High-Profile International Dealers Will
Descend on Prague to Participate in a New Gallery Share Program
appeared first on artnet News.