GRIMM is having a big year. The gallery Jorg Grimm founded in Amsterdam two decades ago — now operating across Amsterdam, New York, and a St James's space in London it opened last year — is marking its 20th anniversary by moving its Amsterdam headquarters into the ground floor of a 17th-century canal house this September. Tucked into the same announcement was the part that belongs on RMAR: the gallery has acquired an 18th-century château in Provence and is turning it into a residency. Château Val Croissant opens in September 2026.

Gallery-run residencies are a growing category, and most of them are easy to read: a guesthouse, a studio, a few weeks of production time before a show. This one is more ambitious than that, and two of its design choices are worth every artist's attention — including the artists who will never set foot in it.

What they bought

The property is the kind of thing residency daydreams are made of: an 18th-century château with 8,000 square feet of living and working space across twenty rooms, five of which are prepared as studios. The house and its neoclassical gardens connect to a 17-acre site with a pool, a tennis court, and lavender fields. Up to five residents and their families can stay at any given time, with rooms held back for shorter visits — writers, curators, and other cultural practitioners will cycle through alongside the artists.

GRIMM's framing is deliberate. The gallery calls it a "third place" for its artistic community — "a home away from home," built on the premise that "inspiration comes from change: of location and environment, of space and cultural influence." And rather than the standard fixed-term slot — your four weeks, then out — Val Croissant is set up as a long-term resource residents return to over the years. The residency is, in the gallery's words, "flexible on time and planning."

The two details that matter

Families are in the design brief. Read residency listings long enough and you notice what's missing from almost all of them: any acknowledgment that artists have children, partners, dependents. The default residency is built for a person who can disappear for a month. That default systematically excludes parents — mothers most of all — and it's why we made family policy a searchable field in the RMAR directory. Val Croissant writes "residents and their families" into the founding announcement, plural, capacity five families at once. That is vanishingly rare, and every program director reading this should notice how simple the sentence was to write.

Time is flexible and return is expected. The fixed-term residency asks you to compress inspiration into a calendar block awarded eighteen months ago. A standing invitation to come back — for a week, a season, whenever the work calls for it — is a fundamentally different relationship between an artist and a place. Almost nobody offers it, because almost nobody's funding model can carry it. A commercial gallery's can.

The catch, stated plainly

You cannot apply to Château Val Croissant. There is no open call, no deadline, no fee — and no doorway. Access runs through GRIMM's own community: the artists it represents, and the writers and curators in its orbit, initially by referral. Early coverage suggests the gallery may also use the château to court artists it wants to work with, which tells you what this really is — not a public program but infrastructure for artist care, the way galleries once competed on dinners and fair booths and now, apparently, compete on lavender fields.

We list invitation-only programs anyway, clearly labeled, for the same reason we list nomination-only ones like ArtPace: so you find out before you spend an evening hunting for an application portal that doesn't exist. The listing carries an "invitation" application mode, and no, we don't know what it costs the residents, because the gallery hasn't said. Our guess is nothing — but "not published" is what goes in the transparency fields until someone publishes it.

Why it still matters to the rest of us

A residency you can't apply to might seem like news you can't use. Here's the use: programs copy each other. When a well-regarded international gallery announces that its residency welcomes whole families and lets artists return on their own clock — and gets celebratory press for it — those two ideas move a little closer to normal. The artists who benefit from that shift won't all be GRIMM artists.

If you want the searchable version of that future today, the directory already filters for family housing, partners welcome, and programs that are actually open to application. And if you end up at Val Croissant — as a resident, a visiting writer, a trailing partner with a tennis racket — leave a review. Invitation-only programs get press releases; artist-written reviews are how the rest of us learn what a place is really like.

Sources

  • GRIMM, "Announcing Château Val Croissant, a residency programme in France, opening September 2026" — grimmgallery.com
  • GRIMM, "GRIMM announces expansions in Amsterdam and London" — grimmgallery.com
  • Artnet News, "Amsterdam's Grimm Gallery Expands With New Headquarters, Residency" — news.artnet.com
  • FAD Magazine, "GRIMM Expands in Amsterdam and Launches Artist Residency in Provence" (June 10, 2026) — fadmagazine.com
  • The Art Newspaper France, "La galerie GRIMM ouvre une résidence artistique en France pour ses 20 ans" (June 10, 2026) — artnewspaper.fr