Good Day!
- Pace CEO Marc Glimcher announces plan to downsize its London branch.
- Influential South-East Asian dealer and curator Valentine Francis Willie has died at 71.
- Experts in Italy accidentally mistook a three for an eight, and misdated an important, 14th-century Madonna and Child painting, now up for auction.
The Headlines
IT’S ME, NOT YOU. Uncertainty still reigns a week after Pace galleryannounced it was cutting roughly 50 jobs and 50 artists. Layoffs have hit nearly every department and are “an ongoing process,” a gallery spokesperson told ARTnews, and which artists are being dropped remains unclear. On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Pace is also looking to downsize its 8,600-square-foot London space into something “less corporate.” CEO Marc Glimcher would not confirm rumors of further London layoffs, but he praised the “tight teams” model at the gallery’s other three locations. At a town hall last week, sources told ARTnews‘ Daniel Cassady, Glimcher largely blamed himself for the gallery’s mismanagement — a notable shift from earlier interviews, in which he framed the trouble as a broader, systemic problem. He reiterated that wider diagnosis to the FT this week, calling the current gallery model “not just broken” but “unfixable.” Pace became one of the defining mega-galleries of the last decade, and it plans to keep all seven of its locations worldwide while “retuning” them, per the FT. To some, that sprawling footprint undercuts the message. One of the dropped artists told ARTnews: “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.”
IN MEMORIAM. Valentine Francis Willie, the Malaysian gallerist and curator who played a pivotal role in advancing Southeast Asian art on the international stage, has died in Kuala Lumpur at 71, The Star reports. Willie co-founded Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA) with Mee Seen Loong, a former Sotheby’s director in Hong Kong. At its peak, the gallery operated spaces in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Yogyakarta, and Manila, becoming one of the region’s most influential commercial platforms for contemporary Asian art. Beyond dealing, Willie curated several landmark exhibitions in the 1990s and early 2000s, including ASEAN Masterworks, which traveled to Malaysia’s National Art Gallery in 1998, and “Identities – Who We Are?” at the same institution in 2002.
The Digest
A 14th-century Italian Madonna and Child was nearly lost to a clerical error after experts in Italy mistakenly dated it to 1850 rather than 1350, undervaluing the work and clearing it for export to Switzerland—where it has now been authenticated, valued at close to $700,000, and consigned to auction. [Corriere della Sera]
Esther Kim Varet, founder of the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires, lost her bid for California’s 40th Congressional District despite finishing as the top Democratic vote-getter with roughly 194,900 votes[Artnet News]
A contemporary art exhibition inside Berlin’s Bellevue Palace, the German president’s official residence, is drawing fire from conservative politicians over the inclusion of a sex-doll sculpture by Alexandra Bircken. [Times of London]
Francesca Casadio, currently vice president and Grainger Executive Director of Conservation and Science at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been named the next director of the Getty Conservation Institute, the J. Paul Getty Trust announced. [My News LA]
A survey by Artnet and the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA) found that nearly half of Gen Z and millennial-aged women are questioning whether they can afford to stay in the art industry. [Artnet News]
The Kicker
A CHURCH’S LONG SHADOW. Today, Pope Leo XIV is inaugurating the newly completed and tallest part of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, called the Tower of Jesus Christ. The ceremony also marks 100 years since Gaudí’s death. But as El País reports, the basilica’s construction, which began 144 years ago, is famously unfinished, and for years controversy has stirred over an unrealized aspect of the design. According to some early architectural plans, a staircase and plaza were supposed to extend outward from the church’s southeast side. But since 1860, two city blocks and many homes now occupy the space that had been earmarked for the staircase, a grand avenue, and a plaza. Residents numbering in the hundreds have fought against plans to demolish their homes and argue Gaudí never intended the avenue and staircase to reach beyond the basilica’s current footprint. Nevertheless, existing city plans backed by the basilica’s Construction Board still call for the building of the avenue that cuts through existing homes. In recent months, progress seems to have been made on the long-stalled negotiations, and all sides have reportedly promised news towards a resolution by September.
