As Pace Gallery cuts artists and staff, the mega-gallery model looks shaky
One of the commercial art world’s “big four” is scaling back, and CEO Marc Glimcher believes the system is broken
Pace Gallery, one of the world’s largest commercial art dealerships, last week revealed significant cutbacks to its mega-gallery model, dealing another blow to an industry under pressure.
One of the “big four”, alongside Gagosian, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, Pace is cutting more than 50 artists from its previous 135-strong roster, and reducing staff by 20 per cent to 200. The gallery will keep its presence in seven cities around the world but, the Financial Times can reveal, is seeking out a smaller space in London.
Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher says “it’s been a tough week with some tough decisions. It can be very hard to do the stuff that you know you have to do.”
He had not held back on the reasons behind the shrinking exercise. “The current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable,” he said in a statement. “Every gallery is currently making temporary fixes and compromises to prop up a system that no longer works.”
At the helm since 2011, in a gallery founded by his parents in 1960, Glimcher explains that “if you have 135 artists, you are delegating everything. You have meeting after meeting, Zoom after Zoom, and you’re no longer talking about why [Alexander] Calder went from wire sculptures to mobiles, because you don’t have the time to do that.”
Big-name artists still on its roster include David Hockney, Julian Schnabel and, indeed, the estate of Alexander Calder, while the gallery recently took on the estate of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi. They are not listing the artists that they are letting go, but those no longer on the gallery’s website include more conceptual, so likely less commercial, names, such as Glenn Kaino and the Japanese digital collective teamLab.
Some “retuning” of its real estate is on the cards, Glimcher said. Pace’s 8,600 sq ft space, on a prime corner of London’s Hanover Square, is already on the rental market, a spokesperson confirms, while unconfirmed are rumours that the gallery has its eyes on a smaller space on the stately Grafton Street, close to the London homes of David Zwirner and Sprüth Magers.
Glimcher says they are after something “less corporate” in the UK capital. While he wouldn’t be drawn on whether this meant a higher proportion of job losses were in London, he says that “we have seen how tight teams have worked in [our galleries in] Korea, Tokyo and Berlin. That is definitely the model for us.”
Pace is, however, still committed to keeping its eight-floor space in New York, where rent is said to be $9mn a year, which Glimcher neither confirms nor denies. “That building was what I call a 2015 decision [ie at a market peak], and you adapt to what you have. It isn’t an easy building to subdivide, but has a lot of office space, so we shall see,” he says.
His news dropped on the eve of the sixth edition of the galvanising London Gallery Weekend, where gallerists acknowledged the tightening backdrop. “The struggle is real and the market has been in trouble for years,” says Matt Carey-Williams, who runs a gallery space in London. “There are fewer buyers and prices are still going up,” he finds.
Carey-Williams notes too the “spate of traumatic closures in London”, including Stephen Friedman gallery at the start of this year and, most recently, Tiwani Contemporary, a space dedicated to contemporary African and diaspora art. Both had smart spaces on London’s Cork Street.
But LGW participants thought too that the reality could be more of a Pace-shaped problem, noting that the gallery had been rumoured to have been experiencing difficulties for a couple of years. “You can’t tar an entire market with the same brush. We are all hoping to build models that aren’t broken,” said Lyndsey Ingram, at the opening of her arresting show of the British ceramicist Phoebe Cummings (to June 19).
Pace’s previous roster was big — Gagosian gallery represents 112, a spokesman confirms. Nonetheless, there was surprise at Pace’s one-fell-swoop dismissal of so many staff and artists, a rare move in the gallery industry. “The sudden offloading of 100 livelihoods feels harsh,” said one London gallerist, while another questioned “the methodology of the decision, given our role to wrap a structure around artists”.
Glimcher rejects criticism of how the announcement was handled. “No other business person or consultant, who wanted to address issues and to affect a change, would suggest doing it bit by bit.”
Glimcher accepts though that “we are really only talking about Pace, not making a prescription for everyone. It wasn’t working for us. And I do know of friends and colleagues in the industry who, since the Covid pandemic, are facing similar challenges and addressing them in their own ways.” The essential issue, Glimcher concludes, is that “you get to a certain scale and you start losing touch, and touch is everything for us.”
This sentiment strikes a chord for other gallerists. Carey-Williams underlines the importance of “having a space that is yours, with artists you know and are responsible for. You have to know your lane.” His current show of newer artists on the scene, called pity this busy monster (to June 26), hits a more realistic spot, with all works priced under £10,000. Ingram says that “there are too many galleries trying to be Gagosian. But that gallery is exceptional, in the truest form of the word — you can’t compete with that.” Her mantra, she says, is “don’t get confused.”
Such clarity could help galleries to push through the commercial realities of a tough market. Carey-Williams describes the current moment as a “klaxon call” for the industry. “When one of the biggest galleries in the world suddenly says it can’t operate like this, it is a reminder that the art market is about dialogue and discourse,” he says. He adds that events such as London Gallery Weekend “give a sense of community, and the hope that there is something out there that we can work towards”.