How to Write a Wall Label: Title, Materials, and the Two Sentences Beside the Work

Most artists get labels wrong in one of two directions. Either there’s nothing beside the piece except a file name, or there’s a paragraph that opens with “this work explores the interplay between memory and materiality” and tells the visitor nothing they can hold on to.

A label is a small piece of writing with a specific job. Here’s how to do it properly, whether you’re pinning a card to a wall or filling in the fields under an artwork in a 3D gallery.

What a label is actually for

A label answers three questions a visitor has, in this order:

1. What am I looking at? Title, and enough factual detail to place it.
2. How was it made, and how big is it? Materials and dimensions. On a screen especially, a viewer has no idea whether they’re looking at a postcard or a two-metre canvas.
3. What should I know that the image doesn’t tell me? One or two sentences. This is the only part where you get to write.

If a sentence doesn’t serve one of those three, cut it.

The conventional order

Galleries have used roughly the same order for a century, and there’s no reason to reinvent it:

Title, year Materials, dimensions (height × width, or height × width × depth) Price, or “price on request”, if the work is for sale

So: Low Tide, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 × 100 cm.

Dimensions go height first. Say the materials plainly: “oil on linen”, “graphite and gouache on paper”, “glazed stoneware”. Not “mixed media” unless you genuinely can’t list them, because “mixed media” is a shrug.

In a Galerra gallery the fields under each work are Title, Year, Price and Description. The title sits at the top of the panel when a visitor clicks the piece, the year runs beside your name underneath it, and the description is where the materials, dimensions and your sentences go. Put the factual line first and the writing after it — a visitor who only reads one line should still learn what the thing is. Leave the price empty and the panel reads “On request” instead of a number, which is the online equivalent of the same convention.

How long the caption should be

Two to three sentences. Forty words is comfortable, seventy is the ceiling. Write more than that and a standing visitor skips the whole block, which costs you the sentence that mattered.

There’s a reason museums keep to this: a label is read standing up, at a glance, with somebody else waiting behind you. The same is true on a phone, only worse.

If you have more to say, say it once — in a short statement for the whole show, or on the room it belongs to — rather than repeating the theme under forty separate works.

How to write about your own work without the art-speak

Art-speak is what happens when you’re nervous about sounding unserious. It reads as evasion. Some phrases to strike on sight:

• “explores the interplay between…”
• “a meditation on…”
• “interrogates the boundaries of…”
• “invites the viewer to consider…”
• “seeks to question notions of…”

Each one announces a theme without committing to anything. Replace them with something a person could actually disagree with.

Three things that always work better:

Say where it came from. “Painted over three winters from the window of a flat in Piraeus.” A fact about the making is more interesting than a claim about the meaning.

Point at something in the picture. “The figure on the left is my grandmother; the coat is the one she was buried in.” You’re guiding the eye, which is exactly what a label should do.

Name a decision. “I kept the underdrawing visible because the finished version looked embalmed.” Artists are experts at their own choices, and those choices are the part nobody else can write.

Then a test: read the sentence aloud and ask whether it could be moved, word for word, under someone else’s painting. If it could, it isn’t telling anyone about yours.

The title is doing more work than you think

The title is the first interpretive act. It arrives before the visitor has finished looking, and it changes what they see.

A grey seascape called Low Tide is a grey seascape. The same canvas called The Morning After the Funeral is something else entirely, and the viewer will find evidence for it in the paint.

Which is why Untitled No. 4 is usually a habit rather than a decision. Genuine reasons to use it exist: you want the work to resist a reading, or the series is deliberately numbered. But if you have twelve untitled pieces and no reason beyond not having thought of anything, you’re throwing away your cheapest piece of communication. For anyone browsing online, a real title is also the thing that makes the work findable.

Good titles tend to be concrete and slightly off-centre. A place, an object, a time of day, a scrap of speech. Avoid titles that only restate the subject (Woman with Flowers) and titles that explain the theme (Fragility II).

Using the AI suggestion properly

Galerra’s curation can suggest titles, descriptions and room groupings for your show, which you review and apply yourself — nothing is written until you press the button. It comes with an unlocked gallery or a subscription; see pricing. It’s useful when you’re staring at a blank field with sixty works to label, and it’s good at the factual scaffolding and at grouping a hang into rooms that read as sections.

What it can’t do is know that the coat was the one she was buried in. Treat the suggestion as a first draft that breaks the blank page: keep the structure, then replace the interpretive sentence with the thing only you know. A gallery where every caption sounds equally smooth and equally anonymous is worse than one where half the works have a plain factual line and the other half have something true.

A quick checklist

• Title that isn’t a placeholder
• Year
• Materials, named specifically
• Dimensions, height first
• Two to three sentences, under seventy words
• Price, or left on request, if it’s for sale
• Read aloud: could this sit under anyone else’s work?

Labels are an afternoon’s work for a whole show, and they change how every visitor reads it. Write them, then hang the show.