Artist Portfolio Website: Examples, Structure, Templates

An artist portfolio website is a small site — four to six pages — built so that a curator, gallery, or collector can see your work, understand what you do, and reach you without hunting. The structure barely changes between disciplines: your work leads, a short About page carries your statement and bio, and a contact route sits one click from every page.

That structure is what this guide gives you: a page-by-page template, three worked examples for different practices, and the captions and checks that make the difference between a site that circulates and one that stalls. A website is a separate deliverable from the PDF or printed portfolio you send to a specific open call — how to build an art portfolio covers that document, and the two draw on the same set of records.

The page-by-page template

Copy this outline and fill it in. The order matters more than the wording — visitors arrive wanting to see work, and every page you put before it costs you viewers.

Home            Three to six images of your strongest work. Your name.
                One line saying what you make. A clear route into Work.

Work            12–24 pieces. Grouped by series or year, not by medium,
                unless your practice genuinely splits by medium.
                Every piece captioned: Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions.

About           Artist statement (150–300 words), then a short bio in
                third person. One portrait or studio photograph.

Contact         Email you actually read. City and country. Instagram
                or the one platform you keep current. Nothing else.

CV / Press      Exhibitions, education, collections, coverage.
(as needed)     Reverse chronological. Only if you have entries.

The two decisions people get wrong: burying the work behind a splash page or a long statement, and grouping by medium when the work reads as series. If a visitor cannot see an artwork within a few seconds of landing, the rest of the site does not get a chance.

Three structures, by practice

The same skeleton, adapted. Find the one closest to your practice and follow its emphasis.

A painter showing series

Home  →  Work (by series: 3 series, 8–10 pieces each)
      →  About (statement + bio)  →  CV  →  Contact

Series pages do the heavy lifting. Each gets a short paragraph — two or three sentences on what the body of work is asking — above its grid. Curators reading for a group show want to know a series holds together, and that paragraph is what tells them.

An illustrator taking commissions

Home  →  Work (by client or by kind: editorial, publishing, personal)
      →  Services (what you take on, how the process runs)
      →  About  →  Contact

Commercial practices need a Services page the fine-art structure skips. Say what kinds of projects you take, what a working process looks like from first email to delivery, and how you handle usage rights. Art directors are checking whether you are straightforward to work with, and this page is where they decide.

A sculptor or installation artist

Home  →  Work (by project, install shots leading)
      →  About  →  CV  →  Contact

Scale is the thing photographs lose. Lead each project with an installation shot that shows the work in a room with something human-sized in frame, then follow with details. Add dimensions to the caption even when a photograph seems to make them obvious — it does not.

Captions: the format to use everywhere

Use one caption format across the whole site. This is the convention galleries, juries, and open calls expect:

Title, Year
Medium
Dimensions (h × w × d)

Untitled (Harbor), 2025
Oil on linen
120 × 90 cm

Field Notes III, 2024
Screenprint, edition of 25
50 × 70 cm

Give dimensions in the units your audience uses — centimeters for most of Europe, inches for the US — and pick one rather than mixing. For editions, state the edition size. If you list prices, list them for every available work; pricing some pieces and not others invites the question you were avoiding.

Writing the two pieces of text

Your statement and your bio are different documents doing different jobs, and the About page needs both.

The statement is about the work: what you are investigating, what materials carry it, what you want a viewer to sit with. 150 to 300 words on a website — long statements get skimmed. How to write an artist statement walks through drafting one.

The bio is about you, in third person, factual: where you work, where you trained, where the work has been shown. Three to five sentences. Keep the longer version — full exhibition history, education, collections — for the CV page, where reverse-chronological entries are what a jury scans for.

Images: the part that quietly decides everything

A portfolio website is a photography project as much as a design one. Uneven images make consistent work look inconsistent.

• Shoot flat work square-on, in even daylight or two lights at 45 degrees, with no glare and nothing of the room in frame.
• Crop to the edge of the work for flat pieces. Keep the same background across every shot.
• Export around 2000 px on the long edge. Enough for a full-screen view, small enough to load quickly.
• Name files descriptively — untitled-harbor-2025.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg. It helps image search and it helps you.
• Write alt text for each image: subject, medium, and what it looks like, in a sentence. Screen readers use it, and so does search.

For seeing how this plays out across finished sites, art portfolio examples breaks down portfolios piece by piece.

Choosing how to build it

Three routes, with the trade-off each one asks you to accept:

A portfolio platform. You choose a template, upload work, and connect a domain. Fastest to live, and the constraint is real: your site looks like the template, and moving later means rebuilding. Reasonable when the priority is having something to send this month.

A website builder. More control over layout, more time spent making layout decisions. Suits you if you have a visual position on how the work should sit on a page and the patience to execute it.

Custom build. Full control, and the standing cost of maintenance. Worth it when the site is itself part of the practice.

Whichever route: use your own domain. A custom domain follows you between platforms; a subdomain on a service you outgrow does not, and every link you have shared points at the old address.

Keep the site current without rebuilding it

Most portfolio sites go stale in a predictable way. The work page still shows what you were making two years ago, because updating it means opening the builder, resizing images, and rewriting captions.

Two habits keep that from happening. Photograph work when you finish it, not when you need it — a backlog of unshot work is what postpones the update. And keep one record of every piece, with title, year, medium, dimensions, and provenance, so the caption is already written when the image goes up.

That record is the part isee.art handles. You upload a photograph or an existing PDF portfolio and it comes back as structured artwork data — title, year, medium, dimensions — which then feeds a public artist page at yourname.isee.art, a digital catalog you can send as a link, and QR tags that take a visitor from a wall label to the full details. Inquiries reach you directly. If you already keep track of where works are and who holds them, inventory records carry provenance and condition alongside the images.

Before you publish

Run this list. Each item is something that costs an artist opportunities more often than it should:

• Your name is visible on every page, and the site title is your name, not "Home".
• Contact is one click from anywhere, with an email address you check.
• Every piece is captioned with title, year, medium, and dimensions.
• It works on a phone. Open it on your own — that is where most visitors will see it.
• Images load in a few seconds. Anything slower and people leave before the work appears.
• Nothing says "coming soon." Cut the section instead; an empty page reads as abandoned.
• Someone else has read it. Ask a person who does not know your work whether they can tell what you make.

Then send the link to three people whose opinion you trust, and ask what they thought the work was about. The gap between their answer and your intention is your revision list.

Your portfolio website works when it stays current, and staying current comes down to having the records ready before you need them. If you would like your work organized that way — catalogued once, then published as a page, a catalog, or a QR tag whenever an opportunity asks for it — you can start putting it together on isee.art.