Art built on instinct, community and the long game.

The idea was simple, if ambitious. Stevens and Kravchenko had watched a generation of Australian artists making work they believed could hold its own internationally, yet whose opportunities were largely confined to artist-run initiatives (ARIs). The work deserved a wider audience, and its makers deserved a more enduring platform.

“We could take that risk,” they explain. Rather than simply exhibiting artists and moving on, they wanted to build a market around them and grow together. Today, Nasha has become one of Sydney’s galleries to watch, with a carefully chosen stable of artists whose practices speak to one another.

That sense of intention extends to the gallery’s home in Haymarket. Kravchenko and his partner had spent time walking the neighbourhood, asking around about available spaces and looking upstairs wherever a door might open. What they found was a part of Sydney with its own rhythm: a place that stays awake after other neighbourhoods have wound down.

For them, it’s more than an address. Exhibition openings spill onto the street, drawing crowds of young people into a neighbourhood where there is still somewhere to go afterwards. The energy feels organic, and the gallery has become a reason for some visitors to rediscover an area they may not have explored since the 1990s or early 2000s.

Inside, the approach is deliberately selective. With just the two directors largely running the physical space, there is little room for a sprawling roster. They choose artists whose work they genuinely admire, and whose practices create a conversation across the gallery. The objective is not to represent everyone, but to stand behind work they believe deserves to be seen.

Drew Connor-Holland was one such artist. A graduate of the National Art School, his work caught the directors’ attention early. They invited him to participate in Nasha’s first group exhibition. He declined.

The story is told with affection and laughter, a reminder that relationships in the art world rarely follow a neat script. When Connor-Holland later left another gallery and walked into Nasha, the timing was right. The three have worked closely together ever since.

For Connor-Holland, the studio is a place where the demands of the working day give way to something less easily defined. He describes going from his day job to the studio, where the work remains work, but is also entirely his own. It is, he says, the closest he comes to being a child in a playground.

That spirit is evident in the small decisions that make a work personal. For an exhibition featuring more than 70 small square works, 55 of them displayed on the wall, the details mattered: a non-functional nail placed in the wrong part of a piece, a small carving on the back, an inside joke shared among friends that only a handful of people might understand.

These gestures may go unnoticed by most viewers, but for Connor-Holland, they are essential. They bring humour and intimacy into the work, making it his own. Authenticity, he suggests, cannot be convincingly faked. If a work is disingenuous, people can tell.

It is a philosophy that sits comfortably alongside the gallery’s own approach. Both artist and gallerists understand that a career in art is rarely a straight line. Connor-Holland describes the industry as a bizarre long game, often a war of attrition in which time and hope can matter as much as talent. Some artists are discovered in their seventies; others only find recognition decades after their deaths.

In the meantime, it is community that makes the uncertainty worthwhile. For Connor-Holland, that means the time spent with his studio mate Flynn and the people at Nasha. The relationships built around the work offer a kind of sustenance that the market alone cannot provide.

Stevens and Kravchenko recognise something of that intimacy in their relationship with the artists they represent. They say it can feel like being entrusted with a secret: someone shares something personal, not knowing how it will be received, and finds it accepted. Their role is to make space for that exchange, rather than dictate what it should become.

Running a gallery has also changed how they look beyond the art itself. It forces them to slow down, to pay attention to things that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

For anyone beginning a collection, Stevens and Kravchenko advocate patience. Buy slowly. Live with works before committing to them. Ask a gallery to bring a piece into your home so you can experience it in its intended setting. A collection, like a relationship, takes time to develop.

But patience has its limits. When a work genuinely resonates, their advice is equally direct: buy it. Stevens still remembers a work on paper by awarded artist Nathan Hawke that he fell in love with as an art student. He was trying to work out how to raise the money when it sold. The painting remains a regret.

It is a fitting final note from a gallery built on conviction. There is no formula for knowing which artist will endure, which work will stay with you or when the moment to act will arrive. What matters is learning to look closely, trusting your instincts and giving good work the time and attention it deserves.

At Nasha, that is the long game: a gallery growing alongside its artists, a community formed around shared belief, and the possibility that a work of art might reveal something new each time you return to it.