Pace CEO Marc Glimcher on Financial Reports, New Europe Location

Pace Gallery’s CEO Marc Glimcher is looking ahead and washing over the headlines over the last week regarding the gallery’s financial accounts.

“We’re all off the bottom, we just had a record art fair at Art Basel Paris, and we’ve had sellout shows of primarily young artists—everything is turning,” he told ARTnews in a phone interview on Monday, noting that the business is already back in the black and will open a new location in Europe “fairly soon.”

Pace Gallery has been shifting its real estate portfolio recently. Back in June, Pace’s London property was put on the market, with the gallery saying it was seeking a “less corporate” space in the British capital, while in September, Pace announced it was seeking tenants for part of its Chelsea headquarters. Glimcher reiterated that London remains a “great market.” He added, “London is working very well. We are never going to close in London.”

He said that many galleries use the city as an international hub where “a lot of work gets done managing Asian and European units. It’s a great place to have headquarters and it carries a lot of weight the way New York does.”

Glimcher hinted that he already has “a couple of amazing choices” for Pace’s next London property, The gallery is currently situated on Hanover Square, taking up 8,600 square feet. The gallery will be “about the same size, and we’re going to a more prime location that fits the model we’ve been working on,” said Glimcher, contending that the business has “done a lot of internal reengineering of the way the companies work together” and that the success of its arms in Berlin and Japan have been “very instructive” to the overall strategy of the business.

Pace Gallery published its 2024 accounts last week with Companies House, the British government’s business register. The filing was 10 months late and recorded a turnover of $67.7 million in 2024, a 35.5 percent drop from 2023, which cashed in $105 million. A pre-tax loss of $2,429 was recorded for 2024 compared to a $6.8 million profit for 2023. (The mega-gallery’s UK registered company, The Pace Gallery Limited, serves as the umbrella company for its operations in Europe and Asia, excluding Tokyo as well as the US.)

Shortly after that, Pace Gallery’s 2025 accounts were published, with turnover dipping 2.6 percent to $65.9 million. “We did a balance sheet shift, which appears to be a loss because we’re changing around the way we invest money and take money from other units and let the money flow through each unit independently,” said Glimcher. “We’re in a process of keeping those units a little more autonomous and self-sufficient, to do that, you have to shift the balance sheet.”

In June, the gallery laid off 50 staffers and dropped 50 artists from its roster, including Keith Coventry, TeamLab, John Gerrard, and Glenn Kaino. (Pace now represents a total of 85 artists.) But now that the dust has settled, Glimcher said the gallery is ready for new life.

“We’re always adding artists and the artists that left the roster were artists [who] we were really not working with,” he said. “There were areas that we were really not engaged with, it wasn’t benefiting them or us. They were not artists that we had a super active engagement with. It’s just about focusing your efforts to do less better than doing more not as well.”

Glimcher said that all galleries have been making changes of late and—at least, for Pace—new strategies are starting topaying off.

“We have had an extremely profitable year already in Los Angeles. The things we’ve done are already bearing fruit, and they’re bearing fruit because the market has substantially changed,” he said. “What we’re doing in London, when we have the space and announce it, it’s going to make a lot of sense to everybody.”