We are re-opening art gallery Noodweer!

About two years and one month ago a friend of mine, Chris, and I, decided to start an art gallery. Well, not really, but that's what happened. It started with me looking for space to exhibit my own paintings and being turned down by galleries because I couldn't guarantee sales or was not able to pay huge entry fees. Chris his mom owns a building and the lower floor is shop space. But she as having trouble finding tenants so she asked Chris if he wanted to use the space while it was vacant. So we decided to exhibit my work there. And then we realized the space was pretty big and invited some other artists to join the exhibition. Rather sooner then later we had made up our mind that we would continue to show other people's work there as well, aiming for starting artists who were having the same kind of trouble as I was. And there it was: Noodweer was born.

We hadn't expected it to be such a success. And we hadn't expected to enjoy it so much either. Turned out we really loved helping new artist, guiding them into the big bad world of exhibiting your work, and yourself, presenting your heart and soul to the world. Once there were paying tenants we had to move. We started looking for a new location but had no budget so things were a lot more difficult then we had hoped. Eventually we decided to use Chris his living room to continue our exhibitions. We were surprised at how successful they were. Through one of those exhibitions we got invited to start organizing the exhibitions at the new Vrijplaats location at the middelste gracht. The building is amazing so we decided to shift our focus there for a while.

 

A few months later Chris his mom told us the tenants (construction workers who were just using the building while working on a project around the corner) were leaving and we were welcome to come back. Of course we said yes! Things have changed a bit though. We have learned a lot and want to do things slightly different. We don't want to get kicked out again when she finds someone who can pay the rent. We want to stay. So we are using some of the walls the previous tenant built, adding a few walls, moving some doors, etc, so we have 3 spaces that we can rent out as art studio's. They're not huge but a good size for a studio. Getting artist to work there should cover most of the rent so we would be able to stay. This would be awesome. We still have some work to do though and budget is tights. We don't have any money to put in a decent floor at the moment so that is going to have to wait. Hopefully, after a few exhibitions we will be able to fix that as well.

I'm really excited about the whole thing. It's a huge project and if it fails I will be highly disappointed, not to mention even more broke then I already am. But people seem to really like what we are doing. We need to professionalize a lot of other stuff as well. We have a facebook page but not a website yet. If you know how to build a website and would like to help us, or know anyone who could, please let us know. We would be eternally grateful. Of course we are also always looking for new artists. If you can think of anything else that could help us, please speak up! You can reach us at galerienoodweer@gmail.com