At the beginning of August, Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery President and CEO, announced the launch of Superblue, a groundbreaking enterprise pioneering an unprecedented model for artists to present their work—and for audiences to engage with it—outside of the traditional frameworks of museums and commercial galleries.
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In September 2019, in Chelsea, Manhattan, the new Pace Gallery headquarters was inaugurated: an entire eight-floor building with a total area of 7,000 square meters, designed by Studio Bonetti/Kozerski. The project left the art world stunned and put an exclamation point next to Pace's mega-gallery status.
This month, less than a year after the opening of Super Space in Chelsea, Marc Glimcher announced another big news: Superblue.
Featuring long-term installations, Superblue will be an experiential art center exhibiting multiple large-scale and interactive works, while offering visitors unparalleled opportunities to be transported to new dimensions. Opening in December, Superblue will not sell precious art pieces, as conventional galleries do. Superblue is a new and standalone company dedicated to producing, presenting, and engaging audiences with experiential art. It will open many venues around the globe over the coming years, with the first experiential art center to open in Miami in December. Lasting approximately 18 months, its shows will be charged with an admission fee with the artists sharing the proceeds.
“You could say it’s an evolution of patronage from the collector to the public, from the collector owning the work, to the public engaging directly with the artist” CEO of Superblue Ms. MacLear said.
The idea was born in response to the rapidly growing public interest in experiential art and the needs of artists working outside the realm of object-based practices. For broader audiences, and younger people in particular, art objects are no longer the draw they once were. This is part of a much bigger shift in favor of immersive experiences and against consumerism in general. For well over a decade, trend-watchers have noted a growing preference for experiences over things.
Beyond sharing ticket revenue with its artists, Superblue expects to commission them to create new works, offering direct financial support to get them started and in other cases helping them land commissions for public artworks from cities, festivals and the like.
The new enterprise will feature artists who are among the pioneers and leading practitioners of experiential art reflecting a wide range of artistic practices and experiences. They include: Nick Cave, Mary Corse, Es Devlin, DRIFT, Simon Heijdens, Jeppe Hein, Studio INI, JR, Koo Jeong A, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kohei Nawa, Carsten Nicolai, Risa Puno, Random International, Michal Rovner, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Studio Swine, teamLab, James Turrell, and Leo Villareal.