Prominent galleries have continued to grow despite post-pandemic profit stagnation, according to UK financial records filed with Companies House, a branch of the government that maintains records for businesses established there. Filings for galleries like Lisson, Thaddaeus Ropac, Pace, and David Zwirner were reviewed by ARTnews; they cover a period between 2019 and 2024. The filings, which exclude US spaces run by these galleries, show that financial losses didn’t hamper expansions in various parts of the world like Europe and Asia.
All companies in the UK of a certain size—in terms of assets, employees, and/or turnover, among other factors—are required to submit such filings. In the US, such financial reporting is only required of publicly traded entities.
Worldwide, Lisson saw a substantial drop in revenue—nearly 30 percent—and a corresponding shift to being in the red. For its fiscal year ending in 2023, the gallery brought in £96 million and made a profit of £3.8 million. For its fiscal year ending in 2024, it brought in £68.9 million and saw a loss of £5.5 million.
In a director’s report included in the filing, CEO Alex Logsdail blamed the drop on a “global slowdown” while expressing confidence that Art Holding Co. Limited—the family-owned parent company overseeing Lisson’s seven locations, including its London, New York, Belgium, and Shanghai galleries—was well-positioned to recover. The gallery noted in its filing that it mitigates risks associated with the “inherent volatility” of the contemporary art market by offering a “diverse spread of artists across a wide price spectrum.”
In a statement to ARTnews, a spokesperson for Lisson said that 2024 was a profitable year, with a “double-digit revenue recovery driven by a return to normal trading after the challenges of 2023.” Lisson declined to disclose its 2024 figures, which could not be independently verified by ARTnews.
One reason for the loss is Lisson’s operating costs, which remain substantial, accounting for 64 percent of turnover in the 2023–24 period and 70 percent in the period prior. The overall turnover for Lisson’s flagship in London, which accounts for the majority of the gallery’s turnover, went from 78 percent between 2022 and 2023 to 73 percent between 2023 and 2024.
Despite the turnover and profit setbacks, Lisson has continued to grow since the pandemic, if incrementally. In 2020, the gallery paid £7.7 million in wages to just under 90 employees. In 2023, it paid £10.7 million in wages to around 100 employees.
It’s worth noting that the overall health of the gallery appears to be good: its shareholder funds, the capital the gallery uses to keep itself running and an indicator of its net worth, has grown since the pandemic, going from £20.9 million to £30 million between 2020 and 2022, then down a bit, to £24.7 million, at the end of 2023.
Like Lisson, Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac’s London branch steadily grew its workforce despite losses in revenue.
At the London location revenues rose from £34 million between 2019 and 2020 to £45 million between 2022 and 2023, and then to £49 million between 2023 and 2024. But that’s an overall drop from the £49 million that the London branch made in 2017, the year the location was inaugurated.
Profit growth at the London location has been similarly up and down, going from £2.9 million during the 2020–21 period to £11.9 million in 2022, then down to £9.4 million for the 2023–24 period. Still, by 2023, the profitability of Ropac’s London location stayed stagnant, under the pre-pandemic level of £10.7 million the gallery reported in 2019.
In the director’s report included in the filing, Ropac attributed drops in revenue and profit to “the global slowdown of art sales and difficult trading conditions for many participants.” (Ropac’s London location reports to a parent company registered in Austria, where the gallery was originally founded.)
Still, wages increased. Staff at the London location hovered around 20 people between 2020 and 2023, but total wages went up around 35 percent, to a high of £2.7 million last year.
As is the case with Ropac’s reporting, Pace Gallery’s UK financial filings don’t provide a complete picture of the business, since they do not account for sales from the gallery’s headquarters in New York. The filings cover the Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul, and Geneva locations, along with London, which are all domiciled in the UK under Pace Gallery Limited. Between 2023 and 2024, Pace saw turnover of £105 million, with operating costs accounting for 75 percent of that figure. After other administrative costs were factored in, the gallery reported bringing in £5.5 million profit, a 12 percent increase from the £4.9 million earned during the 2022–23 period. (The 2023–24 filings exclude Pace’s Tokyo location, which opened this past July.)
Along with the increased profit, the gallery paid £6 million in total wages to 50 employees for 2022–23, a 30 percent jump from what it paid out in 2017.
Investments in wages, as well as advances to artists to maintain current projects, led to growth over the last several years, according to Pace. In the last five years, the sales of artworks originating from overseas locations in Asia and Switzerland has risen significantly. In 2019, the gallery reported £37 million in turnover, compared to £104.9 million last year, a 180 percent increase. During that same period, profit also rose by 24 percent. (Pace’s US entities account for about 80-85 percent of total sales.)
Unlike Pace, one of its competitors, David Zwirner saw a small loss in the same period. David Zwirner Limited, a UK subsidiary within a network of 11 others overseen by Zwirner’s parent company, saw profits fall by £200,000 between 2022 and 2023, even though sales increased by 27 percent, jumping to £52 million. That figure was still 15 percent below the £61 million sales generated in 2019 before the pandemic.
Another takeaway from the filings is where sales are coming from. At Lisson, the proportion of overall sales coming from the UK and Europe fell, from 20 percent in 2020 to 15 percent in the 2023–24 period. At Pace, sales of art to UK collections accounted for around 10 percent for 2023–24. A look at where Ropac London’s sales come from may shed some light on the gallery’s plans, announced last month, to open a new space in Milan. For the 2023–24 period, 71 percent of the London location’s sales volume went to collections in the UK and Europe, but only 8 percent came from the UK itself.
Frieze also filed reports related to its London and Seoul fairs that are available via Companies House. A director’s report noted that Frieze is focused on going where galleries go, and that it intends to put more resources toward Asia, even when there are profit dips. Frieze’s events, which are registered separately from Frieze magazine, have seen revenue growth, from £21.7 million for 2022–23 to £24.9 million in 2023–24, but post-tax profits dropped by over 50 percent during the same period, from £3.7 million to £1.7 million. (The filings exclude figures for Frieze’s New York and Los Angeles locations; a spokesperson for Frieze declined to comment.)
