Host an Art Exhibition at Home | PlotNua Discoveries

Why This Discovery?

People already visit houses like yours.

Irish homeowners open their doors more often than they think. Open House Dublin puts private homes on public tour for nine days every October, free, alongside two hundred other buildings. Culture Night fills the country with open studios one Friday in September.

What almost never happens is the simplest version of the same thing: a homeowner with a wall, an artist living a few miles away with work nobody has seen, and an evening.

What It Actually Is

A weekend, or something longer.

An artist from your own area hangs a body of work in your house. People come, look, talk, and some of them buy.

The work is the artist’s, before, during and after. You are lending wall space, not taking stock.
The scale is domestic. Twenty or thirty people across an afternoon, not a queue down the road.
It ends when you decide it ends. A weekend, a season, or as long as the work suits the room.
Nobody has to sell anything. Some hosts do it purely to give an artist a room.

How involved you want to be

Open the house. An afternoon, an evening or a weekend, with you there for it.
Or not. The work simply hangs in a room you already live in. The artist photographs it in a real home, handles enquiries and arranges collection when something sells. Nobody comes to your door unless you invite them.
Or somewhere between. Show a piece to an interested buyer, pack work carefully, introduce someone you know.

You decide which, and you can change between one show and the next.

There is no organised scheme in Ireland for this. Hosts and artists who do it arrange it directly between themselves.

The Arrangement

What to agree with the artist, before anything goes on a wall.

Who insures the work

Decide this first and write it down. Visual Artists Ireland is explicit that the responsibility must be agreed rather than assumed — including who covers the work in transit, at what value, and what happens if something is damaged.

Whether you take a share

Many hosts take nothing, and there is nothing wrong with taking something. A commercial gallery would take half — Visual Artists Ireland describes a 50/50 split as standard — so a host’s share should be agreed in advance and sit well below that.

Who hangs it, and how

Large work needs proper fixings. Agree who brings what, who puts holes in your walls, and who makes them good afterwards.

Who invites people

The artist usually has the mailing list. You have the neighbours. Be clear which of you is asking whom.

Before You Host

Three things to settle first.

Tell your insurer. This is the one that catches people. Liability to visitors is standard on an Irish household policy, but Allianz states plainly that visitors to your home for business purposes are not covered on a standard home policy, and that visitors’ property is covered only to €2,000. An exhibition with work for sale is not an ordinary social visit. One phone call settles it.

Check where the planning line sits. Planning permission is needed only where a change of use is material. An occasional afternoon is a long way from running a gallery; work hanging all year with viewings sits closer to the line. The judgement is your local authority’s, not ours, and a Section 5 declaration gives a formal answer for €80.

Think about the practical house. Where people park, whether there is a downstairs toilet, and who is watching the front door.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions.

How do I find an artist who would want to do this?

Open studios, Culture Night and local exhibitions are where artists are already meeting the public, and most are reachable directly through their own website. No register of artists looking for a room exists, which is part of why this is rare.

Does the whole house have to be open?

No. One room is enough, and most hosts close the rest. Deciding the route through the house in advance — in, around, out — matters more than how much of it is open.

What if nothing sells?

That is a normal outcome and worth agreeing in advance so it does not feel like one. The artist has still shown the work to people who would never have walked into a gallery.

Is this the same as running a gallery from home?

No, and the difference matters for both insurance and planning. An occasional exhibition is a one-off event in a private house. Doing it regularly, advertised and open to all, starts to look like a business, and both your insurer and your local authority would see it that way.

What Everyone Gets

Three people are better off.

The artist gets a room and an audience. Wall space is the scarcest thing in an artist’s year, and a direct sale means the full price reaches them — exempt from income tax up to €50,000 a year under the Artists’ Exemption.
The visitor sees work in a real room, at domestic scale, beside a sofa rather than under gallery lighting. It is the hardest thing to picture and the easiest thing to judge.
You spend nothing and keep everything. The room is yours again, the artist knows your wall, and your road has met somebody who makes things.

Nothing about this has to happen twice. But the artist now knows your wall, the neighbours know your door opens, and a second one starts from a conversation you have already had.

Looking Ahead

Where this is going.

Everything above can be arranged today between a homeowner and an artist. What follows cannot. It is where PlotNua is going, and none of it exists yet.

Being found. Work in a private house is invisible to anyone who does not already know the host. Making it discoverable, and passing a share to the host when a piece sells, is not something the two of them can arrange alone.
Starting with your Eircode. Future versions could show you artists working near you, exhibitions and host homes close by, and introduce you to people you would have no way of finding otherwise.

This forms part of our long-term vision for PlotArt — connecting local artists, local homes and local buyers through trusted spaces, physical and digital.