This month we interviewed Györgyi Sulyok, manager of Rugógyár Gallery, to find out how GalleryTool (GT) assists their daily work in art gallery and art inventory management. Györgyi also shared with us the gallery’s future plans and her thoughts on the art market in Hungary.
How did Rugógyár Gallery come to life?
We opened as a commercial gallery two years ago, with a goal of bringing together different generations–by joining last century artists with their young avant-garde counterparts. We want to show the public how these different contemporaries influence and inspire each other. We mostly specialize in collective shows, but once in a while we like to introduce young artists’ new works in solo exhibitions too. The gallery resides in a beautiful two-storey building, which was once a factory for making suspension springs (rugógyár literally means ‘spring factory’ in Hungarian).
How did you get to know GalleryTool?
Pál Sándor Tóth (founder of GT) approached us a year ago and offered us a trial version. The art gallery software came in very handy in our busiest period, as we were overloaded on the run-up to our annual Christmas collective show, and GT helped us greatly to keep track of everything. We decided to contract GT for the long run, as it truly helped us to work more efficiently.
How do you use GalleryTool to optimize your daily work and what are your favorite functions?
We love how easy it is to enter the necessary data of every single artist’s works (and that you only need to do it once)–including size, what year it was created, delivery date, price and the other exhibitions that the artwork has been to. All this makes our job so much easier when preparing for exhibitions or when keeping track of artists and their pieces. When you have all this information stored away in a clear and easy-to-use system, everything becomes accessible and readily available, and we can follow the life of an artwork effortlessly. Our absolute favourite function is when we can print out labels for our exhibitions with just a click of a button.
We also treasure how, with the help of GT, we can easily generate a visually-pleasing catalogue for our opening nights. Our visitors really appreciate these small details that we’re able to provide. It’s also a real delight to be able to create a portfolio of our represented artists and show it to our clients, when they have limited time to scroll through our storage. When we want to be time-efficient and find specific artworks quickly in our database, we just have to enter a keyword (such as ‘abstract’ for instance), and GT delivers all the related pieces immediately. All these simple functions make things so much smoother in our everyday work.
How do you see the current trends in the Hungarian art market?
We feel a constantly increasing interest in contemporary art. More and more minds and eyes are opening up to what the industry has to offer, but unfortunately wallets still remain less likely to open due to socio-economic circumstances in the region. One of our missions is to educate the middle class in Hungary about investing in art and buying original artworks.
What will the future bring?
Apart from carrying out an unexpected remake of the gallery’s floor, we are actually planning to expand our talent list. We are closely examining newcomers from the Hungarian Fine Arts University, and hope to be able to inject some fresh blood into our portfolio.
