{"id":516442,"date":"2026-06-24T19:21:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T19:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/516442\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T19:21:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T19:21:23","slug":"pace-gallerys-hall-of-mirrors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/516442\/","title":{"rendered":"Pace Gallery\u2019s Hall of Mirrors"},"content":{"rendered":"

On June 4, when Pace announced<\/a> that it would cut 50 artists from its roster and lay off 50 employees, CEO Marc Glimcher framed the decision as a response to a larger industry problem and a gallery model he deemed \u201cunfixable.\u201d Later that day, according to staff, Glimcher told employees during a surprise Zoom town hall that he took personal responsibility for the situation and acknowledged that the decisions that led Pace to this point were his own.<\/p>\n

But workers inside the gallery say the cuts unfolded quickly and without clarity, affecting the most unprotected staff members \u2014 and among the impacted artists who knew what was coming, some questioned how the announcement was handled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After going through rounds of quieter layoffs, three Pace staffers, speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation, described the recent downsizing and town hall as disorienting in interviews with Hyperallergic. \u201cMarc was saying that all of this was his fault,\u201d said one current employee. But she wondered why the burden of restructuring appeared to fall primarily on administrative and managerial staff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTo my knowledge, there have been zero executives laid off,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s all smaller roles, the people that actually make stuff happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Friday, people started to disappear, and those who were spared had to figure out how to proceed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody knew who was laid off, and we had to consult with each other to try to figure out what happened,\u201d she continued. \u201cMy colleague over text yesterday said, \u2018I can\u2019t believe we\u2019re having to do it this way.\u2019 Why am I texting you? Why am I hearing this from you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Pace did not respond to Hyperallergic’s inquiries about which roles were affected by the layoffs.<\/p>\n

A longtime employee who was let go after nearly two decades at the gallery described first learning of the layoffs through the New York Times<\/a>, and then in a hastily scheduled all-staff meeting. About an hour later, he received an email inviting him to meet with his executive director.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s basically when I knew,\u201d he told Hyperallergic. \u201cI had a few hours to prepare.\u201d He said the explanations were minimal beyond what Glimcher shared during the Zoom town hall. As he packed up his belongings, he noticed people in every corner of the building, teary-eyed, whispering to one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For others, a kind of peace was setting in. The current staffer noted that her colleagues who were laid off were almost relieved: \u201cThey were kind of ready to let go, because Pace is infamous for not giving raises, and there\u2019s definitely an underappreciation of work,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The longtime ex-employee described the severance package he received as standard and uniform. \u201cIt was boilerplate. I\u2019m sure everyone got the same as me,\u201d he said. \u201cBut with the work that I put in and the things I accomplished, I would have expected a little more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shrinking of Pace\u2019s artist roster has been shrouded in confusion from the start. The gallery stated that the cuts amounted to 50 artists, but about 30 were removed from the gallery\u2019s website (including the estates of Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Avedon, which had not been represented by Pace for several years). Although a Pace spokesperson stressed that the gallery would not release a list of cuts \u201cout of respect for the artists departing the gallery,\u201d by deleting the names from its website, Pace made it easy for any journalist \u2014 or anyone on the internet \u2014 to identify who they were, and a list was quickly published by Artnews.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One affected artist, who asked to speak anonymously, citing ongoing financial matters, said they knew the cuts were coming but that the gallery had promised they would happen \u201cgradually and quietly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey assured me many times \u2014 as recently as two days before the article in the New York Times came out \u2014 that there would be no public announcement so that artists had privacy around determining their next steps,\u201d the artist said. \u201cBut the day after the piece ran, Pace removed the names of formerly represented artists from their home page. It’s a callous breach of trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNaturally, artists leave galleries and galleries leave artists, but this must happen with respect and integrity,\u201d the artist continued. \u201cPace has gone to some lengths to control their own narrative \u2026 clearly, they understand having agency around how professional news enters the public sphere, and artists want the same agency.\u201d<\/p>\n

With more time to strategize the transition\u2019s optics, artists may have had a better chance of establishing new gallery relationships. One art dealer who spoke to Hyperallergic chalked it up to the basic law of attraction: \u201cYou\u2019re going to be more appealing if you\u2019re already being courted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For John Gerrard, Pace\u2019s restructuring also came as no surprise, and prompted a shift in the way he works. A digital artist currently showing at the Van Abbemuseum and with a yearlong project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gerrard said he had already been working independently and does not expect to return to traditional representation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been aware of this bubbling and brewing situation at Pace for two years,\u201d he told Hyperallergic. \u201cI\u2019m no longer waiting for anyone to take care of me in that sort of paternalistic 20th-century gallery model. No one is ever going to represent me again, because I will never give up agency like that ever again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among those no longer on the roster are artists with institutional recognition that Pace had taken on fairly recently, such as the late Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch, whom the gallery began representing in February 2022, two months before his death. At the time, Pace framed its decision to represent Nitsch as in line with the gallery\u2019s \u201clong history of supporting artists working in performance.\u201d But Pace mounted just one show of Nitsch\u2019s work in the years since.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have come to the conclusion \u2014 from both sides \u2014 that we are not a strategic fit for a global exclusive representation any longer,\u201d a representative for the Herman Nitsch Foundation told Hyperallergic. Nitsch is now back with Marc Straus Gallery in Manhattan, with whom the artist had a nine-year relationship prior to Pace.<\/p>\n

Speaking about his own experience, Gerrard stressed that \u201cthe gallery was embarking on a particular path and the artists were embarking on another,\u201d describing a widening gap that he suggested primarily affected artists working in digital and experimental mediums. But some have suggested that this divergence was inseparable from Pace\u2019s own expansion, opening locations left and right \u2014\u00a0including its multimillion-dollar Chelsea flagship \u2014 and signing multiple artists each year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, Hyperallergic found that of the artists confirmed to have been removed so far, nine had joined Pace only in the first half of the 2020s, coinciding with the period of aggressive growth that Pace itself has since implicitly acknowledged as a mistake. And at least six artists who were cut are photographers who were brought formally into Pace in 2020 when it consolidated with Pace\/MacGill<\/a>, the photo gallery founded in the 1980s by Peter MacGill with partners Arne Glimcher and Richard Solomon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This period also saw Pace invest optimistically in both \u201cimmersive\u201d art and emerging blockchain technology, launching a revolving door of initiatives so dizzying that it was difficult to keep up with. In the summer of 2019, the gallery announced PaceX, an art-and-tech venture that eventually gave way to the experiential art center Superblue in Miami. A London branch of Superblue closed after one show, and planned New York and Houston locations never opened. Then, in July 2021, at the height of the soon-to-pop NFT bubble, the gallery launched Pace Verso, a dedicated web3 platform that in 2022 hosted Jeff Koons\u2019s first-ever incursion into crypto \u2014\u00a0a series of NFTs tied to a series of sculptures he would infamously send to the Moon<\/a>. (Pace Verso\u2019s website now appears to be defunct<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"\"Jeff Koons and Pace CEO Marc Glimcher at the opening of Lost in America on November 20, 2021 at Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq in Doha, Qatar (photo Cindy Ord\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The story of Koons\u2019s relationship with the gallery is another head-scratcher. Pace added the artist to its roster in 2021<\/a>, shortly after he left Gagosian, which had represented him for decades. But Koons\u2019s tenure at Pace was brief: He left in 2025 and returned to Gagosian. Koons\u2019s studio did not respond to Hyperallergic\u2019s inquiry about the departure from Pace, but it is telling that the gallery quite simply never exhibited his work. In a representation announcement, the gallery said Koons would first show at its Palo Alto space in 2022, followed by an exhibition of new work in its flagship New York gallery in 2023. Neither materialized. (Pace\u2019s gallery in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, closed in 2022.) Instead, the gallery presented a single balloon sculpture<\/a> for two weeks at its Palm Beach location. Why not show and sell one of your most profitable artists if the gallery is low on funds?<\/p>\n

The current employee Hyperallergic spoke to questioned how the institution arrived at its current scale in the first place. \u201cI thought we were mega,\u201d she said. \u201cWhere is this money going?\u201d Referring to the Times article where Pace founder and Marc Glimcher\u2019s father Arne Glimcher cites long-standing skepticism of large-scale galleries, she added, \u201cArne was quoted as saying he never wanted it to be mega. How did you let this happen?\u201d The remark underscores a central irony: a gallery now contracting in the name of sustainability after years of growth that staff say was not always clearly accounted for internally.<\/p>\n

Hyperallergic has been tracking changes to the gallery\u2019s online roster, comparing current listings with earlier versions of the site from 2025 and early 2026. That comparison suggests that it has contracted from roughly 136 artists in July 2025 to about 104 today. If Pace follows through on its stated plan to reduce the roster to around 85 artists, further removals are still likely underway. As for the staffing cuts, it seems like most of these were done in early June, with the majority being employees at the New York location.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just galleries but artists who urgently need to rethink the systems they operate within,\u201d the artist who was cut told Hyperallergic. \u201cMore than ever, I find myself talking with other artists about different ways forward. It’s easy to forget this, but galleries are in fact nothing without us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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