The first two years were experimental. Ivers and Geoghegan curated shows out of their house, picked artists with a connection to Galway, and aimed for the gaps in the city's exhibition calendar. In autumn 2006 they staged a large survey show of contemporary Irish art at the Galway Art Centre, a kind of statement of intent. Later that year they moved into a white cube space in an industrial estate outside the city for the Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, showing work by Benjamin de Burca. The next move - to a more permanent home and a more permanent identity - came in January 2007.

What happened in 2007 was a quiet decision with long consequences. Ivers and Geoghegan reconstituted 126 explicitly on the model of Catalyst Arts in Belfast and Transmission Gallery in Glasgow - both of which trace back to the New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh. A democratic, artist-run model. Membership, an annual members' show, no commercial sales pressure. A voluntary board with strict two-year term limits and a rule that board members could not exhibit their own work. The Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne called it 'tremendously innovative,' a radical departure from galleries, museums, kunsthalles, and art centres - 'a much more rarified offshoot of the world of artist-run projects.' For a small Irish city to host this kind of institution at all was unusual. For it to survive was something else.

In 2009, with its future genuinely in doubt, 126 moved to Galway City centre near the docks. Since then the gallery has survived through repeated funding crises - bids for Arts Council Ireland support, applications to Galway City Council, the kind of grinding administrative work that artist-run organisations do between mounting actual exhibitions. The gallery has moved twice more, five locations in fifteen years. The most recent space also rents out artist studios, a sensible diversification that keeps the lights on. The Galway Advertiser describes 126 as having built 'an international reputation for ambitious programming.' That reputation is the result of programming choices that other Irish galleries either could not or would not make.

The roster of artists shown at 126 reads as a who's who of contemporary practice that wanted somewhere to take risks. Aideen Barry. Vivienne Dick, the New York no wave filmmaker who returned to Ireland. Hank Willis Thomas, the American conceptual artist. Rainer Ganahl, the Austrian artist whose work explores language and politics. Niall de Buitlear, Jim Ricks, Kelly Richardson with her cinematic landscape videos, Samara Halperin, Stephanie Syjuco, the Galway-based singer and visual artist Ceara Conway, the painter Diana Copperwhite, the late critic and theorist Sylvere Lotringer of Semiotext(e). Plus group shows from Ormston House in Limerick, Transmission in Glasgow, Catalyst in Belfast - the sister artist-run organisations that share the same lineage. Partners include the Galway International Arts Festival, the Tulca Festival, the Burren College of Art down at Ballyvaughan, the Royal Hibernian Academy, the National Women's Council of Ireland.

Jim Ricks edited a 2022 book called Artist-run Democracy: Sustaining a Model, 15 Years of 126 Gallery, published by Onomatopee in Eindhoven. The 2015 publication Footfall, by Joanne Laws, made the case for the broader value of artist-led organisations in Ireland. The argument that 126 makes by simply continuing to exist is straightforward: a country with serious cultural ambitions needs places where emerging artists can show without commercial pressure, where curatorial risks can be taken, where the board changes every two years so no clique entrenches. Galway has the Galway International Arts Festival, the Druid Theatre, the Town Hall Theatre. It also needs 126. The house at number 126 is long since vacated. The gallery kept the name and kept going.