Oslo, New York, Paris, Edinburgh — When an Artist’s Studio Becomes International

An artist still works alone in the studio. The work, however, no longer has to remain there.

There is something rather curious about being an artist today. My studio is in Germany. My work is made here, surrounded by the ordinary things of daily life: drawings, screens, pigments, music, unfinished ideas and, very often, jazz.

Yet the moment a work leaves the studio, its geography begins to change.

During the past months, my work has gradually entered several different international contexts: representation through ArtRewards in Oslo, visibility through its partnership with Artsy, headquartered in New York, representation on Singulart in Paris, and most recently a nomination in the Henry Raeburn Prize Open Category connected with the Greyfriars Edinburgh Art Fair.

Oslo. New York. Paris. Edinburgh.

It sounds rather grand when written like that.

But behind those city names lies something more interesting than geography: a changing relationship between the artist, the gallery, the platform and the collector.

What does representation actually mean?

For most of art history, representation was relatively straightforward. An artist worked with a gallery. The gallery exhibited the work, introduced it to collectors and, ideally, helped build the artist's career.

That world still exists, and physical exhibitions remain enormously important to me. In November, for example, my exhibition Jazz & the City — Digital Art with an Analogue Theme opens in Wertheim and will remain on view for a year.

But the contemporary art world has acquired another layer.

Collectors now discover artists internationally through curated digital galleries and art-market platforms. An artist working in Germany can be encountered by someone in London, Amsterdam, Oslo, New York or Tokyo without either person ever having been in the same room.

Representation has therefore become less about where an artist lives and increasingly about where the work can be encountered.

Oslo — ArtRewards

My relationship with ArtRewards, based in Oslo, is perhaps the clearest example.

ArtRewards operates as a curated online gallery and represents artists on a non-exclusive basis. The artist retains ownership of the work and remains free to exhibit and sell through other galleries and channels, while ArtRewards acts as an agent in presenting and marketing selected works to an international collector audience.

For my ArtRewards presentation, I made a deliberate decision: rather than showing examples from every part of my practice, I chose to concentrate on one body of work — my Sound Portraits — Portraits of Musicians Without Their Faces.

The series asks a simple question:

What happens if I remove the musician and the instrument, and paint only what I hear?

Ayler, Ornette, Getz, Rollins, Miles, Chet Baker, Bird, Mingus, Armstrong and Sun Ra therefore become not portraits of faces, but portraits of musical identities.

For me, that makes the ArtRewards presentation something closer to a small coherent exhibition than a general portfolio.

ArtRewards itself reviews artists and individual listings before they appear on the platform, assessing such things as artistic background, professional standing, originality and exhibition history. ArtRewards

That element of selection matters to me. Representation should not merely mean that somewhere on the internet there is another page carrying my name. It should place the work within a meaningful context.

From Oslo to New York — Artsy

This is where another interesting connection occurs.

ArtRewards is a gallery partner of Artsy, one of the major international digital infrastructures through which galleries present artists and artworks to collectors. ArtRewards has its own gallery presence there, including artists, works, exhibitions and viewing rooms. Artsy

Consequently, works from my Sound Portraits series presented by ArtRewards also appear individually on Artsy.

That distinction is worth making: I am represented by ArtRewards, an Artsy Partner Gallery. Artsy itself is not my representing gallery.

Nevertheless, the connection is significant because it creates another doorway into the work. Someone does not necessarily have to know my name, visit my website or encounter an exhibition in Germany. A collector exploring contemporary work through Artsy's international ecosystem can encounter a Sound Portrait there, presented through ArtRewards.

That is one of the remarkable changes brought about by the contemporary art market: the distance between a studio and a collector is no longer measured primarily in kilometres.

Paris — Singulart

My representation on Singulart, founded in Paris in 2017, functions somewhat differently.

Singulart has developed a large international online gallery connecting contemporary artists with collectors across national borders. Artists are selected for the platform, while the gallery provides an infrastructure for presentation, acquisition, authenticity and international delivery. SINGULART

Here I present a broader view of my artistic practice.

Where ArtRewards currently concentrates specifically on Sound Portraits, Singulart allows different parts of my visual vocabulary to meet: jazz portraits, urban works, Bebop, Bop-Dance and other explorations of rhythm, colour and improvisation.

The two forms of representation therefore do not simply duplicate one another.

They offer different windows onto the same studio.

One presents a tightly focused body of work. The other reveals a wider artistic landscape.

And because the representation is not tied exclusively to a single geographical gallery, these different contexts can coexist.

Edinburgh — another kind of recognition

Edinburgh represents something different again.

My work Rhino Quartet was nominated in the Open Category of the Henry Raeburn Prize, associated with the Greyfriars Edinburgh Art Fair.

I would not describe that as representation. It belongs to another part of an artist's professional life: competitions, nominations, exhibitions and juried opportunities through which individual works travel independently of gallery relationships.

That distinction is important.

A gallery representation, an international art platform, an exhibition and a prize nomination do not mean the same thing. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they are different.

Together they create context.

One studio, several doors

Perhaps that is ultimately what these developments mean to me.

I have no desire to collect platform names like medals. The purpose is not to be everywhere.

The purpose is to allow the work to travel.

A collector might first encounter Miles through ArtRewards in Oslo. Another might discover Ornette while browsing Artsy. Someone in France may encounter my work through Singulart. A visitor in Scotland might first see the name beside Rhino Quartet. And someone else may walk into an exhibition in Wertheim without knowing anything about any of these platforms.

Each encounter begins somewhere different.

Eventually, however, they all lead back to the same place:

the work.

The same hand made it.
The same curiosity drove it.
The same relationship between music, poetry, colour and improvisation runs through it.

For an artist, international representation does not suddenly make the studio larger.

It makes the doors leading into it more numerous.

And perhaps that is what I like most about seeing those names together:

Oslo. New York. Paris. Edinburgh.

Not because they make the artist sound important.

But because they remind me how surprisingly far a picture can travel after it leaves the studio.

Gerardus Cornielje Baron von Sachsen
Visual Artist · Poet · Jazz Musician

https://cornielje.art/f/oslo---new-york---paris---edinburgh