Pace Gallery, a mega gallery with seven locations worldwide, is laying off some 50 staff and dropping about 50 artists.
In a statement to ARTnews Thursday, CEO Marc Glimcher said that the gallery will now focus its roster on 85 artists, after growing to 135 and will “continue to be a global gallery” with plans to “ground their programs in the character of the local art scene.”
“Galleries need a model correction,” he said. “For Pace, this means returning to our roots, recentering and reasserting our historic mission: We’re going back to the future, connecting younger artists to their spiritual fathers and mothers, focusing on a group of around 80 artists, which represents an intergenerational mix of new and established artists and estates.”
The news of the layoffs was first reported by the New York Times on Wednesday night. However, sources at Pace told ARTnews that the Times story ran early, before the gallery had actually conducted the layoffs, leading to confusion amongst gallery staff. A town hall is planned for 9 a.m. Thursday morning.
In the Times story, Glimcher blamed an art system that has become “too big, too commercial, too impersonal, and too corporate.” “We all know it’s true,” he went on. :But you actually have to do something to adapt to it. You have to make some substantial changes.” An accompanying photograph shows Glimcher holding the viewer’s gaze, his right hand outstretched on the desk, clenched in a tight fist.
It is not clear which artists have been dropped, and gallery has not released a list of those it will no longer represent. The roster will be cut by about 30 percent. Staff cuts will amount to a roughly 20 percent reduction to 200 from about 250.
Some artists now missing from those listed on the gallery website include Keith Coventry, TeamLab, John Gerrard, and Glenn Kaino. The latter spoke to the NYT and did not seem surprised by the news, which follows industry speculation about the gallery’s finances. “It’s been clear to me for a while that their model was optimized for a vision of the art world that never materialized,” Kaino said in an email.
Pace’s downsizing comes after several years of market contraction driven by economic and global uncertainty, high interest rates, Trump’s trade war, and conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Numerous long-standing galleries closed in 2025, most prominently Blum, who collaborated with Pace on some artists and who also blamed the current gallery system.
Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder, who turned over the business to his son, Marc, in 2010, has long criticized the inherent flaws in the model of the “mega” gallery, marked by a constant need to expand operations, set up shop in multiple cities, and take on large numbers of artists.
“It’s kind of like we’re getting our gallery back,” Arne Glimcher told the Times. “I think this whole mega gallery thing is ridiculous and also unsupportable. I always thought that.” He added that “it’s the difference between a corporation that uses art to expand, and an art gallery that is only about art.”
As ARTnews reported in 2023, Pace scooped up more than a dozen artists over roughly a 12-month period between 2022 and 2023, who also ranged significantly in stature. Last month, the gallery announced it would represent the estate of Constantin Brancusi, and in March, added artist Anicka Yi was joining their roster.Glimcher noted the gallery would continue representing new artists, and that it was holding onto its newly renovated flagship headquarters on Chelsea’s West 25th Street, which reportedly costs about $9 million in rent per year, for a 20-year lease.
Last year, the gallery also joined forces with dealers Emmanuel Di Donna and David Schrader to create the new Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries (PDS), a collaboration that will continue, and which is debuting at Art Basel this month. At the time, Glimcher told ARTnews in an email: “The obsession with competition has gotten us into a low margin, high overhead arms race that benefits neither the artists nor the clients.” As an alternative, “Pace, Di Donna, and David have pioneered a collaborative model which embraces the art world networking relationships. That’s the future.”
