Client Background: Drawing Room

Drawing Room is a London-based, non-profit gallery dedicated to the exploration and promotion of contemporary drawing. Established in 2002 by curators Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane, and Katharine Stout, Drawing Room serves as a major European resource for contemporary drawing, providing a platform for both emerging and established artists to exhibit their work. The gallery offers a year-round program of free exhibitions, educational initiatives, and houses a specialist library with approximately 4,000 books focused on drawing since the 1970s.

Significance of the Drawing Biennial Auction

The Drawing Biennial is a flagship event held every two years, showcasing around 300 unique works on paper by international artists. This exhibition not only highlights the diversity and vitality of contemporary drawing practices but also culminates in an online auction. The auction provides collectors and art enthusiasts the opportunity to acquire original artworks at accessible prices, starting from £300. Proceeds support Drawing Room’s ongoing programs, including exhibitions, educational initiatives, and artist support, thus sustaining its mission to champion contemporary drawing. The Biennial has become a significant event in London’s art calendar, attracting leading international artists and offering the public a unique opportunity to engage with contemporary art.

Project Objectives

Drawing Room approached our team with the goal of developing a robust and reliable auction platform for their flagship Drawing Biennial 2024. Their previous solution experienced performance bottlenecks, particularly struggling under heavy traffic during peak bidding periods, such as the critical final night of the auction. The new platform needed to:

• Reliably handle large volumes of simultaneous transactions and bids.

• Present artworks in an intuitive, user-friendly interface.

• Provide real-time bidding updates to ensure fairness and transparency.

• Support international users by dynamically displaying appropriate local times.

• Seamlessly integrate with accounting software for invoice management.

• Deliver flawless performance on both web and mobile platforms.

Our Solution

To meet Drawing Room’s specific needs, our software development team delivered a high-performance, responsive auction website utilizing advanced web technologies:

• Real-Time Bidding: Implemented using Microsoft SignalR, ensuring instant synchronization and transparency for concurrent bidders.

• Responsive Frontend: Built with Angular, optimizing user experience across mobile and desktop devices.

• Scalable Backend: Developed with C# on Azure Static Web Apps and Azure Functions, ensuring reliability and scalability, especially under peak traffic.

• Internationalization: Designed dynamic time zone displays accommodating bidders globally.

• Xero Integration: Seamlessly integrated invoice generation and financial tracking via Xero accounting software.

• Custom Back-Office Solution: Provided administrators with a dedicated interface for user management, auction oversight, and placing proxy bids for telephone participants.

Our comprehensive solution ensured reliability, intuitive interaction, and exceptional user experiences worldwide.

Results and Outcomes

The newly developed platform performed exceptionally, handling all transactions without dropping any bids or experiencing downtime. The Drawing Biennial 2024 auction successfully raised a remarkable total of £400,000, significantly supporting Drawing Room’s ongoing initiatives. The founders expressed immense satisfaction with the site’s performance and usability, highlighted by a special acknowledgment to our team from the auctioneer on the final auction night.

Completed in just four months, our team at Velocity has already been asked and is enthusiastic about further enhancements for the next auction!