How to Become a Dealer: Leopold Thun and Angelina Volk

Emalin, London, United Kingdom

Tune in to our ongoing series featuring some of the most exciting gallerists from across the globe. Here, we sit down to ask them how they run successful galleries so you can, too.

Portrait of Leopold Thun and Angelina Volk by Annabel Willis.

Emalin was co-founded by Leopold Thun and Angelina Volk who converted a former Bethnal Green locksmith into a contemporary art gallery. The gallery upholds many fascinating artists while their shared art-enthusiasm propels their programme.

Please note that this is an archival interview from 2023.

Working with our friends who are artists on a long term basis. Before we opened the permanent gallery space – and while we were both still at university in London – we began showing artists across different locations (mainly in Europe) on an itinerant basis. There is a lot of joy in advocating for people and artistic practices that you care deeply about and that move you.

We didn’t know. We opened two weeks after finishing university with a healthy amount of naivety and with very little experience in the commercial gallery world and learned in the process.

The location of galleries is significant, especially in sprawling urban centres like London. The context of where an exhibition space is located geographically in a city informs the cultural context in which you’re operating: the types of audiences that come to see your exhibitions, the way your journey to a gallery space preconditions you to experience art in a certain way, the cultural histories that those localities engage and what that can offer artists as a point of reference for making exhibitions.

We always thought that East London felt in line with our identity and the type of work we are interested in showing. The area has changed a lot over the years – and even more so from before we opened our gallery here just over six years ago – but many of our favourite exhibition spaces have stayed committed to their presence in this part of town, both commercial galleries and non-profits, and many new exciting spaces continue to open.

The quality of our artists’ work and the longevity of our commitment to them.

We opened the gallery with Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas, whose installation provided a functional sauna following the closure of a popular local spot in the throes of the rapid gentrification of Shoreditch. The second exhibition was with the NY-based performance artist and musician Kembra Pfahler, whose iconic LES apartment was reconstructed in the gallery and whose band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, performed at the opening – we had queues of people waiting around the block that night. We didn’t immediately announce our list of represented artists when we opened and instead used the first year of the gallery to introduce those artists to our audiences through their exhibitions, including our first projects with Evgeny Antufiev, Megan Plunkett and Nicholas Cheveldave.

We still work with all of the mentioned artists and, after the majority of those artists had their first exhibitions in the UK at Emalin, they have since gone on to exhibit in biennials and at major institutions internationally. In 2019, for example, Augustas was the youngest artist to date to participate in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennial and his installations have entered the permanent collections of museums across the world – three years after showing a performance-activated installation at Frieze, coinciding with his first exhibition at the gallery, that body of work was then acquired by Tate.

Counting the above artists, the gallery currently represents thirteen international artists, including the London based painter Alvaro Barrington, Latvian sculptor Daiga Grantina, Ankara born and Amsterdam based audio-visual artist Özgür Kar, the LA based artist and musician Jasper Marsalis and German Vietnamese multimedia artist Sung Tieu, who works with video, sound, sculpture and installation. Most recently, we began working with Brazilian artist Adriano Costa, whose work we have admired for many years, and American abstract painter Kate Spencer Stewart. It’s a diverse programme with a shared focus on multi-disciplinary and critically engaged practices.

For us it’s usually a slow process in deciding who to work with – we take our time to get to know the artists and their practices. Since we are two founders and programme together, it’s a generative and dialogical process to discover artists together. We have our individual approaches to how we engage with art, so often bring artists to each other’s attention that are specific to our respective interests. Our shared interests coalesce around practices that are materially engaged, that is, where conceptual concerns resolve themselves into interesting material form.

Every relationship is different but we are very close to our artists and are invested in them long term, both personally as friends and professionally as collaborators.

There are incredible gallerists that precede us and we look to many of them for guidance, however, it’s really being embedded in a community of friends within our own generation – gallery owners as well as colleagues who work at established galleries – who provide an amazing support network for one another.

We met in Scotland studying History of Art for our undergraduate degree (University of St Andrews) and then both moved to London, where we completed a Masters in History of Art (UCL and Courtauld Institute).

Understand what you are able to uniquely offer your artists while recognizing that within the unique set of circumstances you provide, every artist has different and individual needs.

Integrity, empathy and flexibility.