Pace gallery has put up its 8,600-square-foot space in London’s Hanover Square for rent, with plans to take on a smaller, “less corporate” space, CEO Marc Glimcher told the Financial Times Wednesday.
While Glimcher would not confirm rumors about additional layoffs in London, he did praise “how tight teams have worked in [our galleries in] Korea, Tokyo and Berlin,” adding, “That is definitely the model for us.” The gallery said further it plans to maintain its seven physical locations around the world, while “retuning” them.
As ARTnews’ Daniel Cassady reported Tuesday, uncertainty has plagued Pace staff and artists since its announcement last week that it is slashing about 50 jobs and dropping some 50 artists. Many told ARTnews they are still unsure whether the cuts concern them.
Pace’s London branch opened its two-level, high-ceilinged space, renovated by Jamie Fobert Architects, in the fall of 2021, and celebrated the moment with a performance by Brooklyn-based artist Torkwase Dyson. (Jay-Z was reportedly in attendance.) At the time, the move that was seen as competitive positioning alongside fellow mega-galleries such as Gagosian and David Zwirner. Now, rumors are circling that the gallery is eyeing a smaller space on Grafton Street, near Zwirner and Sprüth Magers.
The decision to downsize the seven-location gallery has drawn some support, but also pushback against the framing that Pace’s cuts are the fault of a gallery system grown “too big, too commercial, too impersonal, and too corporate.” Pace, after all, helped define the mega-gallery model in the first place. In Wednesday’s FT story, Glimcher dug in, calling the current gallery model “not only broken” but “unfixable” and pointing to “a system that no longer works” — a notable contrast with last week’s town hall, where, sources told ARTnews, he took on a sizable share of the blame himself for the gallery’s managerial missteps.
While both an over-extended art market system and a gallery’s own management choices can both be flawed, for the many artists who were just dropped, not to mention workers who were laid off or are still in limbo, contradictions to how these arguments are being presented can ring hollow.
“It’s hard to square the oft-quoted “artists first” rhetoric of the gallery with Marc Glimcher’s decision to drop artists rather than to downsize by reducing the footprint of Pace worldwide. He’s helped create the very landscape that he’s now purporting to criticize,” one artist told ARTnews, who wished to remain anonymous after being dropped by the gallery.
