We are excited to announce the launch of PickArt Indie, a self-serve tool that helps independent artists sell their work directly from the spaces where it is already on display.
The Problem We Set Out to Solve
Walk into a café, restaurant, or coworking space and you will find art on the walls. Often there is a small label beside the piece: a price, a phone number, an email address. This is the artist trying to sell their works to people by showing it to them in a real space, where they eat, work, and spend their free time.
The viewers' interest is real. The intent to buy is there. And then, almost always, life resumes and the sale never happens.
This is not a new problem, but it is a persistent one. Buying art in a setting like this typically means tracking down the artist, waiting for a reply, negotiating delivery, and hoping that weeks or months later the piece eventually arrives. Most buyers give up somewhere in that chain, because the moment passed.
At PickArt, we have spent all our time on exactly this gap. In our core model, we curate artworks and place them in hotels, restaurants, STR properties, and other venues, handling everything from selection to logistics. But over time, we kept encountering a version of the problem that our usual model was not designed to solve: artists and venues who had already found each other, with work already on the wall and already nominally for sale, just without a reliable way to actually complete the transaction.
PickArt Indie is our answer to that.
What PickArt Indie Does
PickArt Indie brings the same sales engine that powers our curated exhibitions directly into the hands of independent artists: on their terms, in their spaces.
It works simply. Artists register on the platform, upload their artworks with images, descriptions, and prices, and generate a QR label for each piece. They print the label, place it beside the work, and from that moment on, anyone who stops in front of the piece can learn more about it and buy it in a few taps. We support Apple Pay, Google Pay, card, or Klarna. It's all right there, while the connection to the work is still fresh.
No gallery. No staff. No follow-up emails. No invoices chased across weeks. Just an immediate, frictionless path from interest to purchase.
Once a sale completes, payment goes directly to the artist via Stripe. We take a 5% commission per sale. There are no subscriptions, no setup fees, and no monthly charges: we only earn when the artist does.
Built for Artists Who Already Have Walls
PickArt Indie does not curate exhibitions, source venues, or manage logistics. That is what our core consignment programme is for. Indie is purely a sales layer: it captures the moment when someone connects with a piece of art and makes acting on that feeling as easy as possible.
It works in any space where an artist has arranged to show their work: a café, a restaurant, a studio open day, an art fair, a pop-up. If the artwork is already hanging somewhere, Indie can make it sellable without friction.
For artists who want both — the self-serve flexibility of Indie and the curated placement service of our core programme — both can be activated from a single PickArt account, independently and at any time.
PickArt Indie is free to join and open to independent artists now. If your work is already on someone's wall, it should be working harder for you.