Simon Preston Joins Pace as Senior Director

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce that Simon Preston is joining the gallery as Senior Director beginning in August 2019. Based in the gallery’s new global headquarters in Chelsea, New York, Preston will work closely with Pace’s international leadership team led by President and CEO Marc Glimcher, and alongside the gallery’s expanding curatorial department.

In his new role, Preston will work with the curatorial team to manage new artist representation at the gallery and spearhead new initiatives for Pace’s growing roster of contemporary artists, with the recent additions of Sam Gilliam, Lynda Benglis, and Jo Baer to its expansive roster of artists. Additionally, he will oversee a range of artist activities across the gallery’s worldwide locations, including institutional partnerships, art fairs and other special projects, commencing with Trevor Paglen’s exhibition titled The Shape of Clouds, which opens at Pace in Geneva on September 3, 2019.

“Simon is known around the world for his incredible dedication to artists,” says Marc Glimcher. “From his time spent at The Project to running his own gallery, he has built steadfast relationships with both important collectors and many of the most important artists of our time. Pace is thrilled to welcome him to the family.”

“It is an immensely exciting time to join the gallery at yet another pivotal moment in its history,” said Simon Preston. “Pace Gallery has nurtured the careers of some of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for six decades. I am honored to continue to build on this legacy by cultivating new relationships with artists and institutions that will expand the gallery’s extraordinary artist roster and innovative programming.” 

Prior to joining Pace Gallery, Preston was the founder and owner of Simon Preston Gallery, which ran operations from 2008 to 2019. He was part of the first wave of dealers to open on the Lower East Side, where he showed a mix of established and emerging artists such as John Gerrard, Amie Siegel, and Josh Tonsfeldt. Before establishing his own gallery, Simon held positions at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, and was also as a partner of The Project, a gallery based in Harlem in the early 2000s. Preston lived in Hong Kong and London before moving to New York. He holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.