Your post uses periods for thousands separators and mentions Sweden, so apologies if my US-centric view is a tangent. If you're including the taxes the artist

Your post uses periods for thousands separators and mentions Sweden, so apologies if my US-centric view is a tangent. If you're including the taxes the artist pays, shouldn't you include the taxes the gallery pays as well? Both are presumably taxed on net income after expenses. Thus it's not as if the gallery gets to run off with 50% of the revenue (which you called "earnings," but I think you meant revenue) and deposit it in the bank. In the US, a professional such as an artist would file a Schedule C to deduct business expenses from business income and pay only the remainder. Re your later comment, why does the gallery calculate its percentage before VAT rather than after? It seems lopsided that the artist but not the gallery should be subject to a tax on funds that neither ever sees. The artist's business relationship is with the gallery, not with the buying patron, so it seems VAT should be charged on the amount the gallery pays to the artist. Maybe that's just how it is, and maybe it's an artifact of an imbalance of negotiating power between the gallery and artist. But it seems wrong.