Artist Statement: How to Write About Your Art Without Drowning in Generalities

An artist statement is a short text about your artistic position. It belongs to the basic application package alongside the portfolio and the CV. It is read before anyone looks at the work: it sets the frame within which the work will then be seen.

This is often where the difficulties begin. Some artists are convinced that a text like this takes literary talent, and put it off for months. Some write beautifully and with feeling, but in a way that would suit any other artist just as well. Others, on the contrary, retreat into terminology, behind which neither the work nor the person can be seen. All of this can be solved once you understand what job the text has to do.

In this guide we take the artist statement step by step: what it is for and who reads it, how to find the main theme of your own practice, why the medium is part of the statement, what structure the text is built on, and which mistakes most often make it worthless.

Contents

• Why you need an artist statement: what it gives the artist and the gallery
• The main theme: how to find the axis of your practice
• The medium: why material is part of the statement
• Structure: three questions the text has to answer
• Mistakes: what stops the text from working

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Why you need an artist statement: what it gives the artist and the gallery

Let’s start with what an artist statement is not. It is not an art-historical article, not a magazine essay and not a press release. It is a working document whose job is to explain, in a few paragraphs, what you do and why you do it this way.

For a gallerist or a curator, it is a navigation tool. The text shows where the artist is heading, how their projects relate to one another and whether there is a shared logic behind the individual works. When there are a hundred applications in a selection, it is the statement that decides whether your portfolio will be looked at closely.

For the artist, it is a tool for reflection. Until a practice has been put into words, it remains a set of intuitions. When you formulate what exactly occupies you, the patterns become visible: where the research interest began, how it changed, where it led. This frees your head for new work.

A good text answers three questions: what is it, what does it mean, and what follows from it. The first is about facts: themes, media, formats. The second is about meaning: which hypothesis you are testing. The third is about context: why this matters to anyone besides you.

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The main theme: how to find the axis of your practice

An artist almost never works “about everything at once”. There is usually one motif at the core, which unfolds through different subjects, series and materials. The task is to recognise this axis and name it.

Look at your series from the outside. Write down one sentence about each project: what it was about. After a few lines a recurring subject usually emerges, even if the works look nothing alike.

Identify the level of conflict that holds you. Intrapersonal: you and your own states. Interpersonal: you and the people close to you. Social: the individual and the group. Global: the individual and humanity. Most artists gravitate steadily towards one or two levels, and that is already half of the formulation of a theme.

Name your concerns specifically. Memory, the body, ecology, language, religious experience, digital identity: what matters is not the fine word but what stands behind it for you in particular. One and the same theme of love can be explored to one per cent of its depth, or to a hundred.

A single theme is not a lifelong vow. It is a long piece of research that moves into different territory at different times: performance today, sculpture a year from now, then science art. The angles of view change; the foundation remains.

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The medium: why material is part of the statement

The medium is an extension of the idea, not a neutral carrier. The choice of material says something in itself, and the text needs to spell this out.

Test yourself with three questions. Why do you work with painting rather than photography? What does your particular format give the viewer: sound, tactility, scale, smell? How is the material connected to the essence of the theme?

If you are investigating digital identity and you paint in oils, that can be a strong decision, but then it is worth saying so directly. What sounds weak is something else: oil chosen “because that is how it’s done”.

The same goes for references to past movements. Minimalism or abstraction today is not automatically a quotation, and not automatically derivative. What matters is to explain why you need this language now and what new meanings it acquires in your research.

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Structure: three questions the text has to answer

The optimal length is 120–150 words, three or four paragraphs. You can write in the first person or in the third: there is no fundamental difference, what matters is consistency within the document.

The first block: what it is. Clearly and specifically: which themes you work with, in which media, in which formats and techniques. Facts are needed here, not mood.

The second block: what it means. Which hypothesis or question you are investigating, and where it came from. If a personal story lies at the root, show how it turns into works rather than simply mentioning it.

The third block: what follows from it. How your theme relates to what is happening around you: to culture, to history, to today’s conversation. This is not about grand words; it is about why a conversation with you makes sense.

The main test of whether it works. Put someone else’s name into the text. If nothing has changed, the statement is too general and needs rewriting. A second test: give it to an educated person outside the art world. If they understand what you are about, the text works.

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Mistakes: what stops the text from working

These mistakes come up all the time, and almost all of them are fixed by cutting.

• Padding. “Interesting”, “captivating” and “unique” add no information. If a sentence can be removed without losing meaning, remove it.
• A gap between the text and the work. The reader has to see the line from your thought to a specific piece; otherwise the text lives separately from the practice.
• Instructions to the viewer. Don’t write what a person “should feel”. Your part is to say what you put into the work.
• Abstraction on top of abstraction. A more complicated formulation does not make a statement deeper; it makes it unreadable.
• Quotations and comparisons with the classics. Van Gogh and Picasso in your statement work against you.
• A mismatch between tone and practice. A hard-edged political project calls for a dry, strict text; a lyrical series calls for a soft one. Tone is content too.
• A frozen document. A statement is alive: after every new series it is worth rereading, adding to and cutting.

A separate word about the fear of the blank page: it is normal, and there is a mechanical way round it. First, unload everything you think about your art, without worrying about form or length. Then cut the padding and assemble the blocks of meaning. Then put it aside for a few days and come back with fresh eyes. The text is not written in one go: it is assembled in three passes.

Take your current statement and put someone else’s name in place of your own. Has anything changed?