How Curators Choose Art – A Curator’s Perspective
How curators choose art for a curated exhibition? People often ask me this after seeing a Marea Gallery edition go live. The honest answer is less systematic than most expect. There is a process – image quality, theme fit, the balance of the exhibition as a whole – but underneath all of that, there is also something harder to explain: a moment when a piece simply stops me.
I want to walk through what that moment actually looks like – using a real example from a recent edition, without naming the piece or the artist, since the point is the experience of choosing, not the specific work itself.
The first look
I was going through a folder of submissions – dozens of images, one after another, fairly quickly. Most pieces get a few seconds of attention before I move to the next one. This one made me stop scrolling.
It wasn’t the most technically polished image in the batch. The photography was good but not exceptional. What stopped me was something in the composition – a kind of quiet imbalance, like the painting was holding its breath. I went back to it twice before reading the artist statement.
What the statement added
The artist statement didn’t try to explain the piece in grand terms. It described a specific memory – a particular room, a particular light, a particular silence after something had ended. It was understated, almost reluctant. And it matched exactly what I had felt looking at the image before I read a single word of it.
The statement matched exactly what I had felt looking at the image before I read a single word of it.
This alignment between what a piece communicates visually and what the artist says about it is, more often than not, what convinces me. When the two don’t match – when the work feels like one thing and the statement claims another – I find myself trusting the image less. When they align, even quietly, it tells me the artist knows exactly what they made.
How curators choose where a piece sits in the exhibition
Once I knew I wanted to include the piece, the next question was where. Curating an exhibition is not just about which works to include – it’s about how they sit next to each other. This piece, with its quiet, held-back quality, needed space around it. I placed it next to a piece with more movement and colour, so the contrast would let both works breathe.
This is the part of curating that happens almost entirely by feel. There is no formula for which pairings work. I look at two pieces together, sense whether they support or compete with each other, and adjust until the sequence feels right.
What this means if you are collecting
If you are new to collecting and wondering how to trust your own instincts when looking at art, this is, in a way, reassuring. Curators are not running a hidden algorithm. We are responding – to composition, to atmosphere, to the sense that a piece knows what it is. The same kind of attention you bring to a piece that stops you in a gallery, online or otherwise, is the same instinct that guides professional curation.
If a piece stops you – if you find yourself going back to it, the way I went back to this one – that reaction is worth paying attention to. It is, in essence, the same thing that happens on this side of the curation process too.
See what stops you
Each Marea Gallery edition presents a curated selection of original work by visual artists from around the world. Explore the current exhibition at mareagallery.com/exhibitions and see which piece stops you.
New to collecting? Start with our guide: How to Start Collecting Emerging Art.