PAULA DOMZALSKI | AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH
PAULA DOMZALSKI
ART CONSULTANT & REPRESENTATIVE
BY JASMINE SUKARY

CURRENT POSITIONS:
Founding Director of The Art Consultancy , London Office. England
Co-Founding Director Domzalski & Gazaryan Ltd., London, England
Non-Executive Director, Marketing, TwillMill GmbH, Munich, Germany

Paula Domzalski M.A. Trained as an art and culture historian in Germany, Paula Domzalski had spent a large part of her career as initiator, ideas person, strategist, marketing director, and new business developer in creativity-based industries.
Her specialty is positioning, defining core development strategies, and accompanying them from their initial stages to established success.
For the past three decades, she has successfully worked with numerous companies, agencies, and publishing houses, both in Europe and the U.S.

Simultaneously, and following her passion, she continued a career with her own company, developing, producing, and curating international contemporary art projects, writing, translating and producing contemporary art catalogs and books.
The Art Consultancy, London Office, was created in 2014 to position and advance emerging international contemporary artists’ careers.

Paula Domzalski co-founded Domzalski & Gazaryan Ltd., a high-end successful jewelry design brand based in London and Istanbul, previously known as FELICIMOMENTI, In 2008.
She lived in Istanbul for 9 years, defining the brand’s position, marketing, and strategic development whilst co-designing their annual collections.

Paula Domzalski is the non-executive Director Marketing for the Munich-based company TWILLMILL Gmbh.
Domzalski also volunteers for The Connection charity to resolve homelessness in London.
Paula Domzalski lives and works in London and Munich.

Art Market: Hello, Paula! It’s a pleasure having you here. Before we hear all about your activity in the contemporary art field, let’s talk about where the passion for art came from.

Paula Domzalski: I come from a very art-interested environment. My mother was a professional opera singer, an art lover, and a poetry writer. My father was a scientist and a businessman. Funnily enough, it was more my father who “pushed” me gently towards art when I was deciding on my studies. He came from a very cultured Eastern European background, was extremely knowledgeable and interested in History, and loved challenging me on all things, Contemporary Art! Both collected art from contemporary European emerging artists, but just out of love for the work. Not as professional collectors. My first visits to artists’ studios was with them.

A.M.: How would you describe your work in the art field?

P.D.: I am an advisor, muse, consultant, curator, agent, manager, facilitator, and philosophical shoulder to cry on! I am today, I suppose, the culmination of decades of experience working in many areas of the contemporary art world.
I don’t really define myself, but I guess you could say I am a gallerist in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but without a fixed gallery space!
I have a passion for contemporary art, and even when I do other things professionally, I almost ache for it when it’s not present in my life.
After university, where I studied Art History in Munich and Paris, I emerged into a completely different art world from today. A global art market just didn’t exist in the early ’80s. It’s a very small nucleus was between Germany and the U.S. Not that many Fairs, huge snobbery, and undeniably elitism. You learned by doing. Everybody knew of each other.
It was exhilarating but in Germany very rigid and not very friendly. Money did not play
a role.
You just didn’t expect to make any in contemporary art! For that, you had to be a dealer in the Classics. In contemporary art in those days in central Europe, it was considered vaguely vulgar and uncreative to concentrate on Mammon!
The Americans changed all that.
They democratized the art world. And let money in! I thought, at the time, that that was marvelous.
So, just out of Uni, I started doing “pop up” shows in my apartment’s big hallway. I didn’t want to be just one thing, I wanted to experience the Whole. All my friends and associates were either artists or, in some way, connected to the creative world. It was natural for me to curate, produce art magazines, write, produce art books, set up cultural projects, represent artists, and advise (what hybris!). I was in effect, creating and setting the road map for my future way of working.
I still do all these things, building pipelines of interest between artists, patrons, and audience, widening the aperture of access and interest in an artist’s work. A lot of artists fold in on themselves when they have to promote themselves.
That’s when I step in. I hope that my advice to my artists is a little more founded than it was all those years ago! Also, today, I create and produce concepts for art projects with artists that I don’t manage, and here I don’t concentrate on emerging artists alone.

A.M.: Do you consider yourself an artist?

P.D.: I consider myself to be creative, both in business and in my decision-making. I have been involved in or part of creative processes all my life. It’s what feeds me and keeps me going.
I am lucky in that I can help facilitate and manage creative processes with artists and additionally have a company where I can design and channel my own creative needs.
I co-founded a high-end design jewelry brand based in London and Istanbul in 2007. Since then, I have been defining the brand’s position, marketing, and strategic development whilst
co-designing the annual collections.

A.M.: How do you decide whether you should take an artist under your wings?

P.D.: Their work, work, work! It’s almost always about the work itself. The sincerity and respect an artist has towards their art and their passion for what they are doing plays a role, of course, but I can gauge that by looking at their work. I have always been drawn to artists who think outside the box, don’t abide by the rules, question, search, and approach their work with intelligence.
Like everyone else, I am touched by a depth of emotional expression, and I love being awed by adroit techniques. Whilst I was studying, Concept Art and Minimalism reigned. It was almost revered. But I responded more to figurative work. I remember, people thought I was “quaint” in my taste. Well, look at the Market today! Figurative is back! I have a passion for Sculpture, photography, and figurative painting.

A.M.: What parameters do you go by when addressing an artwork? Do you mostly consider the emotional expression, visual attractiveness, usage of unique techniques – or do you mainly focus on the potential demand for the piece on the buyers’ side?

P.D.: The art has to touch me and to surprise me. On the management side, I work exclusively with emerging artists, early to mid-career.
I have to see and feel the artist’s voice coming through in their work: their emotion, their technique, and the strength of their practice. I never make a choice to work with an artist based solely on their market value in mind. I come from a tradition and cultural understanding of l’art pour l’art. Of course, art needs to sell. But that is not my first priority.
I look for artists who are interested in moving their borders in what their art can be. The dealers, the true dealers, see art as a commodity. They create a market, and they manipulate it. Which I think is also a form of creativity! But this is not the core of my approach. I quite simply have to believe in the artist. I do not have to “like” the work, but I need to respect it to induce a more productive level of interaction between it and a broad audience.

A.M.: In your opinion, How did the rolls of galleries and auctions changed throughout your career?

P.D.: The sale of contemporary art is a whole new world unto itself today. When I started out, there was basically only one possibility for an artist to develop their career and sell: through a gallery.
It was the Holy Grail of all artists to find a gallery that would represent them. Of course, there weren’t enough galleries for all the artists.
So the situation was dire. Now, of course, everything has exploded. With an abundance of international Art Fairs, internet platforms, and social media, artists can take their careers into their own hands. They still need galleries, but they are not the only source of support. Simultaneously, the big international auction houses have adopted a lot of a gallery’s functions. Assumed their DNA. By the time an artist’s Market blows up, which is when it comes to auction, they are not emerging anymore.
They’re “making it.” So yes, it is a fundamental goal to also be sold at an auction.

A.M.: Could you please some memorable moments you had experienced when interacting with artists?

P.D.: I have many! But a favorite was while doing a project for the European Capital of Culture in Istanbul with the German artist Christian Schnurer in 2010. “Argonaut Mathilda” was a Czech vehicle installation that the artist drove from Germany through the Balkans to Istanbul, crossing 11 borders on the way.
His final border was the Bosphorus. In his artistic concept, the only way to finalize his symbolic border-crossings was to go across the water and transform his vehicle-installation into an amphibian! So, to enable him to do this, we had to arrange a stop of all tanker traffic on the Bosphorus for about 2 hours.
Now, about 48.000 ships pass through the Bosphorus in a year, including 25 tankers per day! There are strict rules, and NOTHING disrupts this traffic. It was a huge feat getting permission from all official sources for him to cross at the busiest point from the center of Istanbul over to the Asian side! We managed it in record time, basically about ten days before the crossing! Which was totally unheard of. The Admiralty told us it was a unique one-off nod towards art and its celebration during the festivities. It had never happened before and would never happen again; everything was touch and go’ till the last minute, but that’s another story. When the artist reached the other side and the huge sense of achievement that we had waived an unbreakable rule through an act of art, the exhilaration was an unbelievably special moment for the artist and me.

A.M.: Which artists are you inspired by these days?

P.D.: Oh, there are so many! I currently work with the fascinating emerging Turkish-German photo artist Temel Nal. GOLD LIST Award artist by the International Art Market Magazine. His work likened to “photographic painting” is emotional, strong, poetically abstract, and really noteworthy from a technical point of view. None of his work is computer-manipulated. He achieves his painterly “brushstrokes” via a unique technique that he has developed over the years. He literally paints with his camera. In 2019, he started developing his Mask Series. Of course, not knowing how hugely topical this theme would be in 2020. The innocence of his then-choice is almost poignant now. He is definitely one to watch!

Another emerging artist is the New Yorker Francesca Schwartz. Her work intrigues me. Very strong but very lyrical and tender. She creates collages and assembled works. Her Lightbox series blows me away. She is definitely someone to keep an eye on.

I “discovered” Sergio Fiorentino in Noto, Sicily last year. Another emerging artist to watch. Beautiful paintings of oversized faces with a predominance of blue. Meditative, slightly detached but strong in their own world.
A non-emerging artist, who is in full career and who is redefining Sculpture’s dimensions is Sarah Sze. Her work is really amazing. You can see an example just installed in the newly renovated La Guardia Airport in NYC.
Back to Figurative, I have just discovered Ted Pim. An Irish artist who started out painting the most amazing Still Life work in derelict buildings directly onto the semi-darkness walls. His work leans heavily on the classical masters but is just so audacious in its execution. I can look at it for hours! I think he is going to be hugely successful!

A.M.: What do you find creative in your way of life?

P.D.: I was born and raised in London, to a Danish-Australian mother and a Polish father. I spent many of my childhood summers sitting in a darkened auditorium during rehearsals at the Glyndebourne Opera House, where my mother sang and thought that this level of involvement in the creative process was just normal.
I spent decades living in various European countries, spent eight years living in Istanbul, and am now back living in London.
This very peripatetic life demands a high level of creativity just to survive! So, if creativity is accepting no boundaries, if creativity is being true to yourself, if creativity is observation and listening if creativity is living and thinking outside the box, if creativity is facilitating others’ creativity – then I think what I spend my life doing is very creative.

A.M.: In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic threatening public health and causing an economic crisis worldwide, the art field has been having some very challenging times. How did the epidemic affect your career?

Read the Full Article on Art Market Magazine Issue #49