Sophie Gannon

Sophie is a woman entrepreneur who is very hardworking as well as clever. Her business is based upon creation. During 2006, she opened “Sophie Gannon Gallery” in Melbourne. She was just 27 years old when she started this business. She started with six artists who believed into this dealer. Now she is representing 18 names in the art world. These names range from the names of superstars like ‘Cressida Campbell’ and ‘Gwyn Hanssen Pigot’ to the new growing talents like ‘Kirra Jamison’, ‘Julia Deville’ etc. The credit to her growth and success goes to her ambition and hard work. With a positive attitude and an energetic behaviour, she is able to manage her family life along with her clients, art fairs, exhibitions and artists. She has a very friendly attitude and never makes mistakes. She is a business woman who never shows nonsensical behavior .

She knows about her industry from all aspects and has a commerce as well as an arts degree. For this type of job, she has perfect skills. With that, she has very serious acumen for business as well as her arts passion. She took birth at Melbourne. She studied at the Melbourne University and completed her education in Commerce/Arts. She studied a major in French/Art History with Accounting. She was always interested in pursuing business and so got a degree in Commerce. But she did not have any clarity that in which field she wanted to pursue business. There were lots of people around her who worked for the creativity business. Like her Uncle Ben, who was a television as well as film producer. Therefore she decided to make her future into this field. While pursuing her degree for Honours in Art History, she did her first job in “Armadale” at Sotheby's. Here she worked as the PA for Mark Fraser.

After this she got a job for the profile of gallery manager for “Philip Bacon Galleries” at Brisbane. She was always interested in making her career into Galleries of Philip Bacon and arts. Therefore she got the opportunity to move on to Queensland. While working on exhibitions with Philips, she got an amazing experience like Jeffrey Smart and Margaret Olley. But she always wanted to be her own boss and therefore she went back towards Melbourne. Then in October of 2006, she opened up “Sophie Gannon Gallery”. First of all, it was very important for her to start with some stable artists. I started with six artists who were very high profile and did not have any representation at the Melbourne. ‘Nicholas Harding’ was one of them. They went ahead with a chance on her because in age of 27 years, she was full of ambitions and knew that whether she would get success or not.

Coming to the challenges that she faced in her life, the biggest one was for the ownership of contemporary art gallery and for this she had to manage art and commerce tension. And these two were against each other where too much commercial success reflects that artists have been sold out but this success is the key to artists for pursuing future career and have a focus in the practice. And managing critical and commercial success is the key to sustain into this industry. Her two Art fairs of Melbourne gave her huge success and she is hoping to get same in this year. Even stable artists were also able to sustain this success. Judith Wright, one of the gallery artist is continuously achieving this success and currently at Sydney Biennale he achieved the success. Even ‘Michael Zavros’ unveiled his painting at “Bulgari Art Award”. Even ‘Leslie Rice’ got Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. She said that she would go ahead in same way into future.