Announcing Our Dedicated NFT Platform

We're pleased to announce that we now accept Ethereum across the board, for digital and traditional artworks. The development is in anticipation of two major NFT projects launching this month in collaboration with artists Simon Denny (launching July 13, 2021) and Urs Fischer (July 21, 2021).

In 2021, we will launch a dedicated platform for showing and selling NFTs. The platform will host NFTs by artists represented by Pace as well as collaborations with artists from outside the gallery’s program, and will include both primary and secondary market sales. The NFT platform will be accessible from our website and its programming will be spearheaded by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the gallery’s Online Sales Director, supported by our Media Arts department.

The inaugural project on the platform this fall will be a series of NFTs from Lucas Samaras’s archive of digital works. The NFTs will be accessibly priced, starting from as little as USD 5,000. In some cases, digital Samaras prints will be offered as physical tokens to accompany the purchase of the NFTs. Samaras’s intention has always been that his works remain in their native digital format in circulation and exhibition. As early as 2005, the gallery was hosting exhibitions of Samaras’s work displayed on computer screens installed within the gallery space, rather than as physical prints hung on the wall.

Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery President and CEO, says:

“We work with a number of artists who want to make NFTs, so building a dedicated platform where they can show their work was an obvious next step for us. It will allow us to create the optimum environment in which our artists’ work is shown, ensuring the highest quality interface and user experience. 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 will occasionally work with other platforms, as we do now, on a case-by-case basis depending on what makes the most sense for the artist and project.

We are thrilled to launch our platform with an exhibition devoted to Lucas Samaras. As the ‘Grandfather of Digital Art,’ the developments in the NFT marketplace offer Lucas a platform that feels perfectly compatible with his digital work of the past decades. You could say that the technology has finally caught up with his practice. Lucas’s desire that his work exist fully in the space is realized now, for the first time, through NFTs.”

Other Upcoming Artist NFT Projects:

• On July 13, 2021, Simon Denny will be showing an NFT as part of Pace’s summer show, Hiding in Plain Sight, curated by Andria Hickey.
• Urs Fischer’s highly-anticipated online exhibition of NFTs from the CHAOS series will launch on our website on July 21, 2021, and runs through August 3, 2021.

Pace prides itself on being at the forefront of innovation, whether it be through establishing an early outpost at the heart of Silicon Valley, or through support for artists who are exploring the intersection of art and technology. Our first foray into NFTs was through support of John Gerrard’s Western Flag NFT, an artwork classified by Gerrard as the first “superneutral” NFT in the marketplace, aiming to create an entirely ethical and radically transparent NFT sale to capture the philosophy of the Blockchain. The Western Flag NFT is being donated to a west coast institution, where it will be the first NFT in their collection.