Marc Glimcher, president and CEO of Pace Gallery has announced that the gallery will launch its first dedicated platform for selling artists’ NFTs. The new platform will be opened in September and is unnamed yet. The platform will make its debut with a series of new NFTs by Lucas Samaras based on his archive of digital prints. This will mark the artist’s first foray into the medium.
The platform will live on the gallery’s website and be overseen by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, Pace’s online sales director. The new platform will provide an outlet for Pace artists to produce and sell digital artworks while the gallery controls the price point instead of competing with established crypto-art marketplaces such as Nifty Gateway or Rarible.
“By offering artists’ work on our own platform, we can better support them in setting appropriate prices and by managing the sales process more seamlessly than through third parties. We work with a number of artists who want to make NFTs, so building a dedicated platform where they can show their work is an obvious solution,” Glimcher said.
In April, Pace partnered with Urs Fischer on the sale of his first NFT through the auction app Fair Warning, which reportedly caused a rift between the artist and his longtime dealer, Gagosian. The artwork, a digital animation of a lighter merging with an egg, sold for $97,700.
Pace will join forces with Fischer again this month when it hosts an online exhibition of the artist’s NFTs. The show is set to go on view July 21. Later this summer, the gallery will also collaborate on an NFT project with one of its newest roster artists, Glenn Kaino.
Pace is also now accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment for all artworks, physical or digital.
“I’m a crypto person,” Glimcher said. “It’s really painless to accept crypto. It’s just: Why would you not?”