Pace Gallery’s Hall of Mirrors
Despite a tightly controlled narrative, for some workers and artists, the mega-gallery’s downsizing has left more questions than answers.
On June 4, when Pace announced 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 “unfixable.” 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.
But workers inside the gallery say the cuts unfolded quickly and without clarity, affecting the most unprotected staff members — and among the impacted artists who knew what was coming, some questioned how the announcement was handled.
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. “Marc was saying that all of this was his fault,” said one current employee. But she wondered why the burden of restructuring appeared to fall primarily on administrative and managerial staff.
“To my knowledge, there have been zero executives laid off,” she said. “It’s all smaller roles, the people that actually make stuff happen.”
That Friday, people started to disappear, and those who were spared had to figure out how to proceed.
“Nobody knew who was laid off, and we had to consult with each other to try to figure out what happened,” she continued. “My colleague over text yesterday said, ‘I can’t believe we’re having to do it this way.’ Why am I texting you? Why am I hearing this from you?”
Pace did not respond to Hyperallergic's inquiries about which roles were affected by the layoffs.
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, 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.
“That’s basically when I knew,” he told Hyperallergic. “I had a few hours to prepare.” 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.
For others, a kind of peace was setting in. The current staffer noted that her colleagues who were laid off were almost relieved: “They were kind of ready to let go, because Pace is infamous for not giving raises, and there’s definitely an underappreciation of work,” she said.
The longtime ex-employee described the severance package he received as standard and uniform. “It was boilerplate. I’m sure everyone got the same as me,” he said. “But with the work that I put in and the things I accomplished, I would have expected a little more.”
The shrinking of Pace’s 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’s 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 “out of respect for the artists departing the gallery,” by deleting the names from its website, Pace made it easy for any journalist — or anyone on the internet — to identify who they were, and a list was quickly published by Artnews.
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 “gradually and quietly.”
“They assured me many times — as recently as two days before the article in the New York Times came out — that there would be no public announcement so that artists had privacy around determining their next steps,” the artist said. “But 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.”
“Naturally, artists leave galleries and galleries leave artists, but this must happen with respect and integrity,” the artist continued. “Pace has gone to some lengths to control their own narrative … clearly, they understand having agency around how professional news enters the public sphere, and artists want the same agency.”
With more time to strategize the transition’s 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: “You’re going to be more appealing if you’re already being courted,” he said.
For John Gerrard, Pace’s 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.
“I have been aware of this bubbling and brewing situation at Pace for two years,” he told Hyperallergic. “I’m 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.”
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’s “long history of supporting artists working in performance.” But Pace mounted just one show of Nitsch’s work in the years since.
“We have come to the conclusion — from both sides — that we are not a strategic fit for a global exclusive representation any longer,” 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.
Speaking about his own experience, Gerrard stressed that “the gallery was embarking on a particular path and the artists were embarking on another,” 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’s own expansion, opening locations left and right — including its multimillion-dollar Chelsea flagship — and signing multiple artists each year.
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, the photo gallery founded in the 1980s by Peter MacGill with partners Arne Glimcher and Richard Solomon.
This period also saw Pace invest optimistically in both “immersive” 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’s first-ever incursion into crypto — a series of NFTs tied to a series of sculptures he would infamously send to the Moon. (Pace Verso’s website now appears to be defunct.)
The story of Koons’s relationship with the gallery is another head-scratcher. Pace added the artist to its roster in 2021, shortly after he left Gagosian, which had represented him for decades. But Koons’s tenure at Pace was brief: He left in 2025 and returned to Gagosian. Koons’s studio did not respond to Hyperallergic’s 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’s gallery in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, closed in 2022.) Instead, the gallery presented a single balloon sculpture 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?
The current employee Hyperallergic spoke to questioned how the institution arrived at its current scale in the first place. “I thought we were mega,” she said. “Where is this money going?” Referring to the Times article where Pace founder and Marc Glimcher’s father Arne Glimcher cites long-standing skepticism of large-scale galleries, she added, “Arne was quoted as saying he never wanted it to be mega. How did you let this happen?” 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.
Hyperallergic has been tracking changes to the gallery’s 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.
“It’s not just galleries but artists who urgently need to rethink the systems they operate within,” the artist who was cut told Hyperallergic. “More 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.”
