Pace Reconsiders Its London Footprint as Marc Glimcher Calls the Gallery Model “Unfixable”
Pace is moving through one of the most consequential restructurings in its recent history. A week after announcing roughly 50 job cuts and the removal of about 50 artists, the gallery is now weighing a smaller London presence, according to reporting this week. CEO Marc Glimcher has described the current gallery model as “not just broken” but “unfixable,” a blunt assessment that underscores how deeply the company is rethinking its scale.
The London branch, which spans 8,600 square feet, may be recast into something “less corporate,” according to the Financial Times. Glimcher did not confirm rumors of additional layoffs in London, but he praised a “tight teams” approach at Pace’s other three locations. The gallery, which became one of the defining mega-galleries of the last decade, plans to keep all seven of its locations worldwide while “retuning” them.
The restructuring has also sharpened questions about how large galleries balance global reach with artist relations. At a town hall last week, sources said Glimcher took personal responsibility for the gallery’s mismanagement, a notable shift from earlier public framing that treated the problem as systemic. One artist said the move was difficult to reconcile with Pace’s long-standing “artists first” rhetoric, arguing that the gallery is reducing its roster rather than its footprint.
The same news cycle also brought the death of Valentine Francis Willie, the Malaysian gallerist and curator who helped advance Southeast Asian art internationally. Willie died in Kuala Lumpur at 71. He co-founded Valentine Willie Fine Art with Mee Seen Loong, and the gallery became a major platform for contemporary Asian art across Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Yogyakarta, and Manila. His curatorial projects included “ASEAN Masterworks” and “Identities – Who We Are?” at Malaysia’s National Art Gallery.
Another story this week showed how fragile attribution can be. A 14th-century Italian “Madonna and Child” was nearly lost to a clerical mistake after experts in Italy dated it to 1850 instead of 1350. The error cleared the work for export to Switzerland, where it was later authenticated, valued at close to $700,000, and consigned to auction.
Taken together, these developments point to an art world in recalibration — one where scale, expertise, and institutional authority are all under renewed pressure.
