The Pace Gallery is an American contemporary and modernart gallery with 10 locations worldwide. It was founded in Boston by Arne Glimcher in 1960. His son, Marc Glimcher, is now president and CEO. The gallery is named after Glimcher's father. It moved to Manhattan in 1963 and from 1993 to 2010 operated jointly with Wildenstein & Co., a gallery specializing in old master painting, as PaceWildenstein. In 1993, after sales had slowed following the art-market crash of 1990, Arne Glimcher agreed to take up Daniel Wildenstein's long-standing merger offer; by 2010, the Glimcher family paid $100 million to buy back the Wildensteins' 49 percent share in Pace's assets, including an inventory of several thousand paintings.
Gallery spaces
Pace Gallery operates three spaces in New York City, and others in California, in China, in London and in Paris. In the 1960s, Glimcher and Irving Blum briefly operated a Pace outpost on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. From 1995 to 1999, PaceWildenstein had a gallery in Beverly Hills, designed by architect Charles Gwathmey. From 1965 to 1982, Eva Glimcher maintained a Pace Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, downtown on Broad Street. After her death, the branch closed, with nobody to carry on her work. From 2008 until 2019, PaceWildenstein – and later Pace – maintained a space gallery in the Factory 798 District of Beijing, China; it was the first major Manhattan art gallery with a presence in the city. It opened in 2008, to coincide with the Summer Olympics in the city. Under the direction of its president, Leng Lin, Pace Beijing showed a mixture of American, European, and Asian artists. Since 2012, Pace has been occupying the west wing of the Royal Academy of Arts's6 Burlington Gardens building in London, beginning with an exhibition that juxtaposed late paintings by Mark Rothko with photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. In April 2014, Pace used the former Tesla Motors building in Menlo Park, California as a temporary exhibition space. It later opened a permanent gallery in downtown Palo Alto in 2016. Also in 2014, Pace operated a temporary space in Chesa Büsin, a historic 12th century house in Zuoz, Switzerland. In 2018, it opened a permanent gallery in Geneva. In 2019, Pace is scheduled to open its newest space, designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, spanning eight stories across — of which are outdoor exhibition space. In addition to exhibitions, the building will feature Pace Live, a multidisciplinary program of music, dance, film and conversation with a full-time curatorial director at the helm. In 2020, Pace opened a temporary exhibition space in East Hampton Village. Pace is a partner in the Pace/MacGill, which specializes in photographs and is run by Peter MacGill. In 2019, Pace/MacGill closed its standalone space at 32 East 57th Street after four decades to consolidate with Pace’s headquarters at 540 West 25th Street.
Publishing
Over the course of its first 50 years, Pace was involved in releasing some 450 catalogues for its shows and artists. In January 2009, PaceWildenstein announced plans for an independent publishing company called Artifex press, dedicated to the creation of online artists' catalogues raisonnés. In 2015, the company launched a unit specifically for digital catalogues raisonnés.
Controversy
In 2016, London art dealerJames Mayor filed a lawsuit against Arne Glimcher and the Agnes Martincatalogue raisonné committee, arguing that they had hurt the value of 13 works of Martin he sold after they decided not to include them in their catalogue. The New York Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in 2018.
