If Sid Motion Couldn’t Make It Work, Which Galleries Can?

When Sid Motion Gallery was incorporated in December 2015, its founder was still working full-time. Sidonie Motion, 38, had found a disused betting shop in King’s Cross and spent mornings, evenings and weekends stripping it out, helped by friends and family. She took a two-year lease from the owner of the kebab shop next door and opened her first exhibition in June 2016.

“I launched the gallery without knowing whether the sales from one exhibition would be enough to sustain the next,” Motion recalls. “It was an exciting and uncertain time.”

The exhibition was called What’s It Going To Be? The title referred partly to locals who wandered into the former betting shop, sometimes with coins still in their hands, asking what the space was becoming. But Motion says the question was directed at herself too.

A decade later, there is an uncomfortable symmetry to it.

The Artist Whisperer

Sid Motion Gallery Ltd remains, for now, an active company. Incorporated on 29 December 2015, it has filed micro-company accounts, most recently for the year ending December 2024. Motion’s mother, Jan Dalley, the former long-serving and influential arts editor of the Financial Times, has been a director since incorporation and was initially the person with significant control. That status transferred to Motion in June 2021, when she took control of at least 75% of the company’s shares and voting rights. Her father is Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate.

Motion’s new space benefited from sustained media coverage. A profile in Artnet published in October 2022 reads: “Motion has built a name for herself as a friend to artists, with an astute eye for up-and-coming talent.” Friends of Motion declared her to be: “The artist whisperer.”

The gallery itself will close in October. Motion says the business is no longer in the financial position to support its artists at the level she believes they require. She is choosing to stop rather than allow the programme or that support to diminish.

Over the course of a decade, the gallery acquired many of the things that ought to make a young dealership durable. After moving from King’s Cross to South Bermondsey in 2019, Motion based it at the Penarth Centre, among dozens of artists’ studios. Its programme focused substantially on emerging and mid-career artists; it ran a graduate prize with Central Saint Martins and organised tours for collectors and patron groups. Motion established the South Bermondsey Art Trail, became a co-founder of London Gallery Weekend and a trustee of Southwark Park Galleries.

Image Luke Fullalove, courtesy Sid Motion Gallery

Familiar Footings

These were not unusual ambitions. Many of the galleries now closing or contracting had established rosters, institutional relationships, access to major art fairs and substantial international visibility.

In London, Stephen Friedman Gallery entered administration in February 2026 after 30 years in business. In October 2023 it had moved into substantially larger premises on Cork Street, followed shortly afterwards by the opening of a New York gallery. Its 2023 accounts recorded a £1.7m loss, attributed to renovation costs and overlapping rents, compounded by what the directors described as a downturn in the market. Later filings described cash flow as “tight” following slower-than-usual sell-through at the end of 2024 and a slow start to 2025.

Tiwani Contemporary ceased operations in May 2026 after 15 years. Founded by Maria Varnava in 2011, it had become one of the few year-round UK galleries devoted to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. It too had expanded, opening in Lagos in 2022 and moving to a larger Cork Street space in 2023. Following a review of its finances, the gallery cited “rising operational costs and wider market uncertainties” and concluded that its “current commercial model is no longer sustainable”.

Courtesy Tiwani Contemporary

Different Pressures

Other examples point to competing demands and stresses. Marlborough began winding down its international galleries in 2024 after almost 80 years, citing succession and governance rather than profitability as the principal reason. Almine Rech closed its large Mayfair space the following year before opening another London gallery around a quarter of the size.

In the US, Venus Over Manhattan closed in July 2025, with founder Adam Lindemann saying he wanted to return to collecting. Kasmin followed the next month, although senior figures subsequently established Olney Gleason. Clearing shut its New York and Los Angeles galleries, with founder Olivier Babin explicitly citing rising rent, shipping and art-fair costs alongside falling revenue. Tim Blum, meanwhile, began phasing out permanent spaces in Los Angeles and Tokyo in favour of what he called “a more flexible model”.

The wider data points to restructuring rather than extinction. The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026 identified around 205 galleries that announced significant changes to their operations or premises during 2025. Closures accounted for 25% of the sample and downsizings another 2%, while openings accounted for 42%. The report cautions that closures reflected personal and business-specific circumstances as well as wider pressures from rising costs and thinner margins.

New York provides a similar corrective. Among 608 galleries that held at least one exhibition in 2025, researchers recorded 36 openings against 20 closures, producing a net gain of 16 gallery spaces. At the same time, the report identified experimentation with shared premises and other ways of reducing fixed costs while maintaining access to collectors and audiences.

British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA and his 2023 exhibition Free The Wind, The Spirit, and The Sun at the Stephen Friedman Gallery on Cork Street in London. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery.

A Market Correction?

Nor has this happened against a backdrop of straightforward market collapse. Global art sales rose 4% in 2025 to an estimated $59.6bn, following two consecutive years of decline. Dealer sales increased by a much more modest 2% to $34.8bn. In the UK, sales rose 2% to $10.5bn but remained below their 2019 level, with dealer sales more subdued than the recovery at public auction.

The relationship between sales and costs is more revealing. Dealer operating costs increased by an estimated 5% in 2025, more than twice the rate of sales growth. Packing, shipping and logistics rose 10%, art-fair costs 9%, and travel and accommodation 6%.

For some galleries, selling more was not enough. Among dealers turning over between $250,000 and $500,000, 45% reported declining margins, the highest share of any turnover band, despite the segment recording one of the strongest increases in aggregate sales. The report suggests that, for some businesses, the costs involved in producing those additional sales may have outweighed the benefit.

The Art Fair Bind

Art fairs illustrate the bind. They accounted for 35% of dealer sales in 2025, up from 31% the previous year. Booth and exhibiting costs represented 15% of dealer spending, while associated travel, packing, shipping and hospitality added another 17%. Dealers told the report that even successful fairs could fail to generate enough profit to justify the expense.

Then there is Pace. In June, the mega-gallery announced that it would cut more than 50 artists from a roster of 135 and reduce its workforce by around 20%. It is also seeking a smaller London gallery to replace its 8,600 sq ft Hanover Square space, with chief executive Marc Glimcher saying Pace wanted something “less corporate”.

Glimcher was unusually categorical about the decision. “The current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable,” he said in a statement, arguing that constant expansion and rising primary-market prices were no longer sustainable for Pace.

Part of the problem, according to Glimcher, was scale. A roster of 135 artists meant increasingly delegating relationships that had once been central to the gallery itself. “You get to a certain scale and you start losing touch,” he told the Financial Times. “And touch is everything for us.”

Pace Gallery, Geneva. Creative Commons license.

Touch is Everything

He was careful not to universalise Pace’s predicament. “We are really only talking about Pace, not making a prescription for everyone,” he said. “It wasn’t working for us.”

And so here is the nub. Sid Motion already looked rather like the alternative Glimcher describes: small, closely involved with its artists and rooted in a particular local scene. That gallery is now closing too.

Ten years ago, she opened a converted betting shop unsure whether the sales from one exhibition would pay for the next. In the decade since, the gallery acquired most of the things that ought to have made that proposition less precarious: a reputation, collectors, institutional relationships and a distinct place within London’s art scene.

Yet Motion has arrived back at essentially the same calculation with which she began: whether the income from selling art can support everything expected of the gallery around it. She is not the only dealer deciding that it cannot.