A 20-year-old gallery shut its doors in the city earlier this year. Vinnyasa Premier Art Gallery has hosted several wine and cheese evenings, launched new artists and promoted old ones, even as it changed location from The Music Academy to Mylapore. But with every passing year, it became harder to sustain the gallery, and finally, as Viji Nageshwaran, the owner, reportedly confirmed, it had to close.
Flip the pages of history, and you’d find that Vinnyasa is just one among many contemporary art spaces that started on an ambitious note but fizzled out due to various reasons, the most important one being a financial crunch, says art critic Lakshmi Venkatraman. Even Gallery Sri Parvati on Eldams Road, which was run by her since 2005, had to be shut down last year. The nearly 80-year-old house that was its home started crumbling after the 2015 floods. “Due to a lack of funds for renovation, I had to close it,” she says.
Just in the past few decades alone, galleries have been rising and falling like the tide. Gallery Sumukha, a popular Bengaluru-based gallery, opened its doors in Chennai on its 10th anniversary in 2006, but closed soon after; the Faraway Tree Gallery rose in Rutland Gate and fell; Sakshi Gallery, which started in Chennai in 1984, moved to Mumbai in 1992. Similarly, a small gallery space inside My Fortune in Gopalapuram that had a unique ‘art-at-home’ concept-based Thinking Hats Home Gallery, closed its doors to the public, and moved all of its works to Art Bistro at GRT Grand.
The challenge
Running a space exclusively for art is, as is unanimously agreed by gallery owners, a tough business. Adding to the challenge is the new tax reform which imposes a tax bracket of 12% on “paintings, drawings and pastels”, “original engravings, prints and lithographs”, “original sculptures and statuary in any material” and “antiquities of an age exceeding 100 years”.
“Art is the last priority for anybody, hence marketing it is a challenge,” rues Sarala Banerjee, owner of Sarala’s Art Centre, which was opened in 1965 by Sheriff of Madras, Mary Clubwala Jadhav, and continues to survive as the oldest gallery in the city. “We have been associated with over 150 artists, including the legendary KCS Panicker and MF Hussain. Lalu Prasad Shaw and Jogen had their first one-man show here. Before Sarala’s Art Centre, the artists survived on craft-making or portraits. There was a gallery which closed down shortly after it was started; it was run by Kora Ramamurthy who was himself an artist…” recalls Banerjee.
What contributes to the woes of gallery owners is the trend of ‘Online art galleries’, where people can browse through thousands of artworks as compared to limited works inside a room. “People don’t come to galleries as they feel they can experience everything on the Internet,” says Sharan Apparao, who runs Apparao Galleries (established in 1984). “I am able to sustain myself because I don’t have to pay the rent. If I had been paying rent, I would have had to shut down long ago. So it’s not really profit but passion. I started because I loved art, and I am in it for the same reason. The business side is to sustain the love of the arts.”
Vincent Adaikalraj, founder of the five-year-old Art Houz at Kasturi Rangan Road, subscribes to the point: “We are able to hold on to the business only because we also run Arts Illustrated magazine, a printing and framing line called Print Studio and have a good presence online — around 10,000 artists on Mojarto.”
Up the game
So if you are going to plunge into it, you have to know what it takes, because “an art gallery is a long-term business proposition driven by an elastic market,” says Shalini Biswajit, founder of Forum Art Gallery. “Apart from the cost that goes towards maintaining a gallery space, trust and relationship between an artist and the gallery, and the gallery and the client, is built over a period of time. It’s also a challenge to present interesting shows and artists that draw buyers. Those who can sustain, remain in the game, and those who cannot are weeded out,” she says.
And to up the game, “our space is transformed with every show”, she adds. “We have, over the years, seen maestro Balamuralikrishna perform with AV Ilango responding on canvas. Musicians such as Anil Srinivasan, the late Madhav Chari, Sikkil Gurucharan, Subhashree Ramachandran, dancers such as Anita Ratnam and Ramli Ibrahim have performed at the gallery. They are crowd pullers no doubt, but they add to the experience of an art show.” That apart, activities such as ARTINK, an art education programme for children and adults on art appreciation, “increases the footfall in the gallery and is a financially sustainable addition to art promotion.”
Above all, what is really important is to make people aware about art, to let them know that art is not just for the elite, to have them step into a gallery. “As long as people visit exhibitions, the artist is encouraged to produce more work. He does not stop, when it does not sell,” says Chitra Ragulan, founder of Studio Palazzo, Anderson Road, (started in 2001), where now popular artists such as Santhanakrishnan, N Ramachandran and Benita Terciyan kickstarted their careers. “Not every show is a success. But for the artist, it is important that his paintings are seen. And Chennai, which has always been predisposed to support the performing arts and cinema, is slowly opening its mind to art.”
