How a one-person gallery in Lisbon runs ten exhibitions a year.

The first thing Inês does when she walks into Atelier Norte each morning is open her laptop and look at her dashboard. Atelier Norte is a small contemporary art gallery in Lisbon, in the Príncipe Real neighborhood. The space is one room, eighty square meters of white walls and concrete floor. Inês is the founder, the curator, the gallerist, and the only full-time employee. She runs ten exhibitions a year.

Five years ago, when she opened, the operation lived on a Google Sheet, a Squarespace site she had built from a template, and a stack of paper consignment agreements. By the third year, the spreadsheet had two hundred and forty rows and a "DO NOT TOUCH" comment in the header. The gallery was working, but the operation underneath was not.

Inês moved to Galexivo in late 2024. This is what a typical month looks like now.

Monday — opening week of a new exhibition

Inês is opening a solo show by Joana Silva, a painter she has worked with for three years. The works arrived from Joana's studio on Saturday in two crates. Sunday, Inês unpacked them and photographed each one against the gallery's standard wall.

Monday morning, she opens the Galexivo mobile app, taps "New artwork," and walks through the works with her phone. She speaks the title, dimensions, medium, year, and price for each piece. By the time she is done — about forty minutes for fifteen works — every artwork is in her inventory, photographed, priced, and tagged with the exhibition.

She drags the fifteen works into a new exhibition called "Joana Silva: Litoral." She sets the dates. She uploads the press release. She publishes the exhibition page to her public site. The Joana Silva landing page is live by lunch. The artworks appear on the gallery's homepage as "now showing." The newsletter draft is already partially written, populated from the exhibition data.

Tuesday — the consignment

A new artist, Rui Marques, has agreed to consign six pieces for a group show in May. He arrives at the gallery to drop them off. Inês opens the consignment workflow on her laptop, adds the six works, generates a consignment agreement PDF with Rui's terms, prints it, and they both sign.

The works are now in Galexivo with the status "consignment — Rui Marques." Rui has access to a portal where he can log in and see the works, their status, and any sales. He no longer has to email Inês asking "where are my pieces."

Wednesday — the collector

A collector named Pedro arrives unannounced. Inês has seen him twice before — both times briefly, both times without buying. She quickly opens his contact card on her phone before greeting him. The card shows: visited twice in 2025, looked at Joana Silva's previous show, expressed interest in mid-size oil paintings under €5,000, never given an email address.

Inês greets him by name. She walks him through the Joana Silva show, paying attention to the works in his stated price range. He buys two pieces. She closes the sale through her phone — the works are marked sold, an invoice is generated and emailed to Pedro, and Stripe processes a deposit. Pedro leaves a happy customer. The whole interaction took twenty minutes and the paperwork is already done.

Thursday — the writeup

Inês has been meaning to write a blog post about the Joana Silva show for two days. She opens the blog editor, types one sentence — "Joana Silva's new series began with a road trip along the Algarve coast" — and clicks Continue. Studio AI extends the paragraph in her established voice (she set the tone to "essayistic, first person") using Joana's bio and the exhibition tags. Inês reads the draft, rewrites about a third of it, adds a personal anecdote, and publishes.

The blog post links automatically to Joana's two previous exhibitions and three related artists. Inês would not have made those internal links manually. They quietly improve her SEO.

Friday — the newsletter

Galexivo has drafted the weekly newsletter using the exhibition opening, two recent sales, a blog post, and an upcoming event. Inês edits about 20% of it, adds a personal note at the top, and sends to her segment "Lisbon collectors who attended an opening in 2024." She watches twenty-six recipients open it within the first hour.

Saturday — the catalog

Inês is preparing for next month's group show. She wants a printed catalog. In Galexivo's catalog tool, she drags the eighteen works into a sequence, selects a layout (full-bleed image with caption on the next page), sets ISBN and publisher, and exports a print-ready PDF. The PDF goes to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. By the time the show opens, physical catalogs are available for sale on Amazon. She did not pay anyone to design the catalog. She did not pay an upfront print run. She did not lose money on unsold copies.

What changed

Inês did not become a different person. She still runs the gallery alone. She still curates the same kind of art. But the part of her week that used to be administration — maintaining the spreadsheet, copy-pasting between Squarespace and Mailchimp, writing follow-up emails she meant to send, designing catalogs in InDesign — has shrunk to a fraction.

She spends the recovered hours visiting artist studios. Atelier Norte is on its tenth exhibition this year, up from six the year before Galexivo. Sales have grown 40 percent.

She still keeps a paper notebook. She uses it for notes from studio visits.