Pace Didn't Break the Mega Gallery Model. It Broke Itself

It’s not often a mega-gallerist publicly throws his toys out of the pram. 

And yet, on 2 June, Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher, who has run the business since taking over from his father in 2010, did just so in the New York Times, declaring the whole mega-gallery system broken. 

The announcement was framed as a reckoning: the art-gallery system “became too big, too commercial, too impersonal and too corporate,” he said. 

It was a striking thing to hear from the man who had helped build one of the four galleries that drove the exact system he was denigrating. 

His interjection was followed by Art Basel’s former global director Marc Spiegler’s op-ed diagnosing a similarly broken art market model, also in the Times – an irony given that Spiegler had launched the Hong Kong and Paris editions of the fair.

But is the model really broken, or did Pace’s rapid-fire expansion then contraction over the past six years just become unsustainable? Glimcher’s reign, to recap, included: Closing Beijing. Opening an enormous space in Chelsea, New York. Opening Superblue. Launching Verso, a blockchain business. Closing Superblue. Closing Verso. Closing their Hong Kong space. Then opening Pace Di Donna Schrader, their secondary-market venture.

The leading Irish artist John Gerrard joined Pace in 2019 and, in his words, “lovingly decoupled” from it a year ago. So, when the gallery announced this spring that it was cutting 50 artists and reducing its staff by 50, he was no longer among the names being trimmed – he had already gone, despite remaining on the roster list.

Strategic Mistakes and Misadventures

Speaking to The Art Journal from Vienna, where he keeps a production studio, Gerrard is careful. “I’m not going to be publicly critical of Pace,” he says. He is also generous about Glimcher, a man he credits with “an experimental soul.”

But, on the subject of the announcement itself, he is critical. The article, to his mind, was the error.  “If you’re downsizing and stepping back from decisions you’ve made, just do it quietly,” he says. “I wouldn’t do this big ‘I’m downsizing’ press splash. I think that was a strategic mistake, and it was unnecessary.” 

He is not alone in suspecting the round number was theatre. In an article, ARTnews was able to identify only 30 of the 50 apparently cut artists, several of whom, like Gerrard, had drifted off the roster rather than been struck from it.

For Gerrard, it comes back to a building – a classic tale of real-estate misadventure which has led to the downfall of an increasing number of galleries. Pace’s eight-storey flagship gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan – renovated in 2019 for more than $100 million and held on a 20-year lease at around $9m a year – is an enormous fixed cost. Gerrard watched it reshape the gallery. “That building in Chelsea was quite a burden of a lease,” he says. “It needs huge trade to support it. It all became more bread-and-butter. A whole generation of artists who came into Pace couldn’t meet the requirements of that scale.”

The UK’s Companies House filings hold revenue, profit and loss data for three of the four mega-galleries: Hauser & Wirth (UK art operations), Pace (London, Beijing, Seoul, Hong Kong and Geneva operations) and Zwirner (UK operations). Gagosian runs its UK business as a direct US subsidiary and those numbers are not reported. 

Retained Capital

The numbers show interesting discrepancies between the financial health of the businesses: when Hauser & Wirth’s revenue halved in 2024, its trading stayed profitable and its gross margin actually rose. What strains a gallery at this scale is not weak sales but a large fixed-cost base – such as leases.

On the surface, the three galleries’ finances look very similar: In 2023, Pace turned over about £84 million, Hauser & Wirth £144m, Zwirner £55m. However, Hauser & Wirth and Zwirner have each built roughly £26m of retained capital; Pace’s owners hold £1.26m on a London company that owed £13.5m in debt and stays afloat through its Asian arms and a £17.7m loan from the New York parent. Of the three dominant galleries, Pace is the thinnest-capitalised.

In 2024, global art sales fell 12 percent to $57.5 billion, according to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Art Market report. The damage fell hardest at the top: dealers turning over more than $10 million saw sales drop 9 percent, while the smallest dealers grew 17 percent. Hauser & Wirth and Zwirner have filed their 2024 accounts – straddling the market trough – with pre-tax profits down about 85 percent at both; Pace’s 2024 accounts are overdue and unfiled, presumably due to administrative issues.

An unfixable model?

In 2025, the tide began to turn in the art market: the $10 million-plus dealer segment grew by 3 percent – a small, but noticeable change. Pace's decision to cut 30 artists on the conviction that the model is "unfixable", according to Glimcher, is starting to look less like a response to the art market's supposedly "inescapable" boom-and-bust cycles and more like a business problem of its own, particularly as the top end of the market begins to recover.

The gallery’s business had been volatile for a while. In 2016, the gallery launched an immersive art-meets-tech space Pace Art and Technology. The initiative was framed as a collaboration with arts philanthropist and collector Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley (Arrillaga-Andreessen is the partner of A16z venture capitalist Marc Andreesen). It featured artists including teamLab and Studio Drift, known for their immersive environments, and charged a $20 entrance fee – Pace’s first experiment with ticketed entry.

In 2019, Pace closed its Beijing location, with Arne Glimcher telling ARTnews at the time that it's “impossible to do business in mainland China right now.” In the same year, the gallery absorbed Peter MacGill's photography gallery, folding it into an in-house Pace photo department. In 2021, Pace launched Superblue, a space dedicated to immersive experiences, this time in collaboration with the collector Laurene Powell Jobs, who also sat on the board. Entrance tickets to the Miami-based venture cost $40. It then launched Pace Verso, a custom-built NFT platform which included Loie Hollowell and Grimes drops. The platform was aimed at crypto-collectors and cemented the gallery's love affair with digital art practices. But it proved to be one-sided: the ticketed platforms were wound down, Palo Alto in 2022 and Miami in 2023, among cost overruns. On invitation, both Arne and Marc Glimcher declined to comment when approached by The Art Journal.

Simmer down, slow down, pay attention

Gerrard was a key artist for Pace Verso. In 2022, he sold Petro National on the platform – a work now in the collection of Paris’ Pompidou Centre. For years, Gerrard told Pace that digital art was where the value lay: “I told them: ‘Simmer down, slow down, pay attention.’”

But Verso, he says, “almost fell into a startup model with income projections, doubling or tripling of revenues” – a classic case of corporatisation of the art business. What it needed, Gerrard says, was “a ten-year plan, to do less, over a longer period”. Verso quietly shuttered in 2023, having collapsed with the crypto market. Its wind-down was so quiet that Gerrard still does not know when it formally ended, he says.

Endling marked Gerrard’s high point with Pace, a year after joining the gallery: a 2022 show in which he was given free rein of the gallery's mammoth Chelsea space. The show was evidence of “major galleries at their finest,” Gerrard says.

Then the line went flat. He says: “2023 was quieter, ‘24 deathly quiet, ‘25 deathly quiet.” Late last year, he agreed he would work independently. He puts it with humour: “Okay, Daddy’s gone. Initially I thought it [the gallery] was just busy, but then I realised I had better get out there and hustle up some dinner.”

Gerrard sold a triptych of his editioned real-time software pieces, STANDARD (2022), Flare (Oceania) (2022) and Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017) for $1.5m to a significant private collection via Fellowship, a digital art platform, in Zero 10, Art Basel’s digital section, in June. Pace’s own highest disclosed sale at the same fair was $1.4 million each for two works from Lynda Benglis’ series Power Tower (2019). “Pace had the three works, they had the token, they had the archive, and they had me,” he says. “We could have made that sale two years ago.” His one criticism is that the gallery shut him out of his own presentation at fairs. “For a big gallery, the fair is kind of sacred – considered a purely commercial area. And it’s not; it’s an art area. Once you get out of peer-to-peer relationships with artists, you’re in trouble. Collectors aren’t being served.”

Further downsizings followed: Pace shuttered its Hong Kong space in October 2025, citing an expiring lease and headwinds in the region. In June of this year, the gallery announced it was seeking a smaller alternative to its 8,600sqft Hanover Square space in London.

Squaring the artists-first rhetoric

It’s hard not to see the boom and bust cycle as a symptom of a gallery chasing after new markets which then failed to manifest: seeking an alternative revenue model with the ticketing and immersive experiences, aiming at a younger crowd, and trying to engage with new money and crypto collectors in Palo Alto, Miami and on the blockchain. An artist Pace dropped told ARTnews anonymously: ‘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 criticise.’

The 30 artists that have been culled by the gallery roughly map to the boom-and-bust cycle plus estates. Firstly, photography from the Pace/MacGill legacy, which forms the largest cluster with 11 artists: Avedon, Christenberry, Goldblatt, Paul Graham, Koudelka, Roversi, Verburg, Katchadourian, JR, Hai Bo and Hong Hao. Six years after taking over MacGill, Pace is shedding the photographers who came in the door with the gallery. Photography prices are on average much lower than those for painting or sculpture, as they are usually editioned. Secondly, Pace’s Beijing roster. Five artists were let go: Hai Bo, Hong Hao, Liu Jianhua, Sui Jianguo and Xiao Yu. Thirdly, immersive/digital art – the Superblue/Verso bet. Four artists: teamLab, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, John Gerrard and Glenn Kaino. Digital art, on average, also sells for less than traditional mediums, and it appears Pace is focusing on its margins. Fourthly, estates. Seven deceased artists being pruned: Avedon (d. 2004), Christenberry (d. 2016), Goldblatt (d. 2018), Sonnier (d. 2020), Nitsch (d. 2022), Takamatsu (d. 1998) and, oddly, Robert Rauschenberg (d. 2008), a foundational postwar name whose work regularly commands six- or seven-figure sums. It seems that some were let go before Glimcher’s June announcement: Gerrard is “relatively certain” that Pace ended the relationship with the digital cohort about a year ago, while retaining their names on the website. What motivated Glimcher to place the announcement the way he did is uncertain.

Scale is a volatile place

The gallery now appears to be focusing on higher-margin, lower-overhead ventures: in December 2025, the gallery announced Pace Di Donna Schrader as a three-way venture between Pace, Emmanuel Di Donna (of Di Donna Galleries) and David Schrader, the former Sotheby’s private-sales executive, dedicated to resale/secondary-market dealing rather than representing living artists. And, in May 2026, on the eve of a record-breaking $107.6m Sotheby’s sale, Pace announced that it had picked up the Brâncuși estate from Paul Kasmin gallery, which shuttered after the death of its founder.

While Pace is shedding living artists and killing the “mega-gallery model”, it’s simultaneously building out secondary-market capacity. Therefore, the “unfixable model” isn’t the mega-gallery – it’s the cost of carrying a large roster of living artists whose work sells in the five-to-six-figure range. Profitable estates and secondary-market dealing at high prices are where the margins are now. It is noteworthy that Pace actually reduced the number of estates in the cull, dropping the less profitable ones from its roster. Currently the gallery represents an estimated 36 estates, against Hauser & Wirth’s 40, Gagosian’s 30 and Zwirner’s 25.

However, that market is also extraordinarily thin. By Glimcher’s own account in Texte zur Kunst, Pace holds a database of eight to nine thousand collectors but only around a thousand who are “really active,” he said, noting that the gallery sells roughly 2,000 works a year. The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting notes that among the 3,100 wealthy collectors surveyed, average spending on art in 2024 was $438,990 – but the median was just $24,000. A handful of buyers determine the success or failure of a $9 million a year lease in Chelsea. One of these was Laurene Powell Jobs, one of ARTnews’ 200 top collectors, and cofounder of Superblue. Following its collapse, Julie Davich notes in her newsletter The Appraisal, it is likely that Pace lost her as a client. Hauser & Wirth is now said to be her gallery, bidding on her behalf for the $181.1m Pollock at Christie’s in May. Hauser & Wirth is opening a space in Palo Alto this year.

“Marc Glimcher’s statement that chimed with me most is that scale is a volatile place,” Gerrard says, describing the last decade as “an arms race between four galleries” fed by “such an expansion of private wealth in the last 25 years.” He does not exempt artists from the reckoning: “we have to question our support of such systems.” For gallerists working with artists he says, “Art is slow – so move at art’s pace, listen, breathe, and just be careful. If you have an experimental soul, as I do, you keep it lean, keep it mean, because it’s hard to be experimental with enormous costs. It’s one or the other.”

The mega-gallery model isn’t broken, just Pace’s version of it.