When I left the academy in Karlsruhe and set up my first studio, my work lived across three hard drives, a notebook, and my memory. Then a gallery asked for the dimensions and year of four pieces, and it took me half a day to answer. An artwork inventory solves exactly that problem.
What is an artwork inventory?
An artwork inventory is the complete, ordered list of everything you make. Each piece gets one fixed entry with the details you reach for again and again: for insurance, galleries, exhibitions, and sales. It is the foundation everything else builds on.
Which fields per piece?
These fields cover almost every situation:
- title and year
- medium and materials
- dimensions (height before width before depth)
- a unique work number
- status: in studio, on loan, sold
- at least one good photo
Everything else, like provenance or exhibition history, you can add later. Don’t start with the perfect system. Start with these six fields.
How do I number works?
Keep it simple. Year plus a running number is enough: 2026-014. Assign the number once and never change it, even if the title changes. The number is the anchor that lets a gallery record, an invoice, and a certificate all point at the same piece.
Common mistakes
The most common mistake is keeping the inventory only in your head or in file names. The moment a piece leaves the studio, you lose track of it. The second: renumbering works after the fact. That breaks every link to old invoices and loan forms.
In Opus’s studio tools you fill these fields once and pull a loan form, certificate, and invoice from them without retyping anything. I’ll cover importing from a messy spreadsheet in its own post.