There has been much talk of late about the museumification of mega-galleries. These apex art-market predators have the resources to build massive flagship spaces with more square footage and more bells and whistles than most museums. Chief among them is Pace Gallery, which opens its eight-story, 75,000-square-foot flagship on West 25th Street in Chelsea on September 14. (For comparison, the Breuer building, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, is 85,000 square feet.)

Today, Pace announces the star-studded lineup of inaugural exhibitions that will fill that space, including a show of sculptures by Alexander Calder, a massive new work by David Hockney, a display of Fred Wilson’s chandelier sculptures, and a show of new paintings by Loie Hollowell, one of the youngest artists in the gallery’s stable.

“Pace has designed and crafted every element of our new global headquarters to provide a vehicle for artists to tell their stories as richly as they deserve to be told,” the gallery’s president Marc Glimcher told artnet News. It also doesn’t hurt that “we’re six months ahead of schedule,” he said.

Pace worked closely with the Calder Foundation to coordinate a display that will inaugurate the 3,600-square-foot first-floor gallery. The show will examine the breadth of Calder’s early output, including wire portraits and abstract painting, during the period leading up to his 1931 creation of the mobile. On the sixth floor, a monumental Calder sculpture will complement the first-floor exhibition.

Architectural rendering of the ground floor gallery of 540 West 25th Street, New York. Image courtesy of Bonetti /Kozerski Architecture.

A presentation of Hollowell’s boldly colored, biomorphic abstract paintings will fill the second floor. But the biggest crowds will likely flock to the third floor, where Pace will display a new 24-panel panoramic drawing by David Hockney, as well as four additional individual drawings inspired by the artist’s recent stay in Normandy this spring.

Architectural rendering of the seventh floor gallery of 540 West 25th Street, New York. Image courtesy of Bonetti /Architecture

Meanwhile, on the seventh floor, Pace will showcase the evolution of Fred Wilson’s signature chandelier sculptures, which the artist began making in 2003, the same year he represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. Since then, Wilson’s chandeliers have become vehicles for the artist’s ongoing exploration of themes including blackness, death, and beauty. The Pace presentation will include five chandelier sculptures, spanning his first to the most recent, which was conceived for the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017.

Architectural rendering of the south east façade of 540 West 25th Street, New York. Image courtesy of Bonetti /Kozerski Architecture.

The new Pace headquarters was developed by Weinberg Properties and designed by Bonetti/Kozerski Architects, who collaborated closely with Glimcher. The new facility more than doubles Pace’s existing exhibition space in New York and contains five distinct galleries, both indoor and outdoor, and a flexible seventh-floor space that is being eyed largely for performances.