The Few Gallery – Art Will Save the World.

Muusa is glad to introduce Hannes Unt- the man behind the online art gallery The Few Gallery, a place where visitors can find (and buy) the works of famous graphic designers. An initiative Muusa value also because the decision of devolving the 10% of each sale to charity.

In his ”normal life”, Hannes is the creative director of the design agency Loovvool and he likes saying that the online gallery as an hobby. An hobby that, besides offering to its visitors a ”virtual” art experience, gives them also the possibility of buying limited edition works of new talents as already well- known designers.

He constantly seeks for new interesting talents all over the world and this results on his gallery seeing the partecipation of artists from Argentina to Finland. Including also many famous names working for globally known brands.

And the participation to the project has also some ”strict” rules: each artist is in fact allowed to make only one artwork for the gallery making not more than 30 replicas so that the product sold by TheFewGallery can always be quite exclusive ones.

”Buy Art and Save the World” wrote Urban Daddy explaining TFG and its social commitment of devolving part of the sales to help disadvantaged children, wishing more and more people will try to become charity activists and art collectors at the same time.

And trying to discover how the project works and how it places itself in the art business, I decided to ask some questions directly to Hannes Hunt.

” When I started this project, I looked into several design and illustration communities and blogs and I have to say that some really interesting things came up. After that it was rather easy- I started contacting artists and explained my idea.

When I started with the first ones, I had nothing to offer except my very detailed plans but then, once the gallery was up and running, everything went smooth.

Till the point that people started to send me pictures of works to exhibit there by themselves!“

Let’s talk about the famous ones. Who are they?

”It is quite difficult to pick names up randomly as I would surely forget about someone. Mmany of them cooperate with global brands such as Absolut, Coca- Cola, Mini, Nokia etc and are globally appreciated.

But, practically speaking, where and how do you get buyers and artists?

I have not really advertised a lot yet. We have experimented a little in some design blogs such as www.dezeen.com. Mostly we advertise online and we will probably continue to do so.

We communicate generally with English- speaking media because most of the clientéle comes from foreign countries. That is why our gallery is not really popular in Estonia.

Has anybody from Estonia ordered some pieces of art from your gallery?

At the moment there have been the most clients from The US, but – unfortunately! – none from Estonia, yet.

The works are rather exclusive. So are the prices. How is the business going during these difficult times?

The timing for starting this kind of project was probably not so good because it is clear that buying art is not a primary priority during economic difficulties which, said in simple words, means that sales could go better.

But as this is more like a hobby than a real job, then we do not have to rush. We are amending our gallery, adding new talents, new works and then selling them gradually.

Maybe we will do better tomorrow. I think that the prices of the works are rather reasonable if you take their uniqueness and quality into consideration.

Computer graphics does not have a very long history. Are there collectors who buy these kind of pieces of art like classical art is bought?

Sure. There are collectors interested in modern computer graphics and illustrations and they are often affected by the visual trends of the moment. But experience shows that it is really difficult to find constant buyers for this kind of art.

The Few Gallery and charity: which projects do you support?

We give 10% from each sold artwork to four charity organizations:

Survival International- The only international organization that supports aborigine tribes and the survivour of their culture.

Concern Worldwide- An international organization helping people on the edge of poverty in the poorest countries in the world.

Save the Children- The worlds biggest organization aimed by the purpose of helping children in need in more than 120 countries.

World Wildlife Fund- I suppose most of the people know this one.

Visit: The Few Gallery

or Read the Article in Estonian: Kunst päästab maailma. Ilma irooniata.

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