Three Blue-Chip Dealers Join Forces for Pace Di Donna Schrader, Opening in June

Pace Gallery, Emmanuel Di Donna, and David Schrader are forming a new joint gallery devoted to secondary-market sales, a boutique operation with global reach and the pedigreed muscle of three heavyweights behind it. Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries, or PDS, begins operations January 1, 2026, with a formal space opening on New York s Upper East Side in the summer and a major historical exhibition slated for the autumn.

The move is striking not for its scale but for its philosophy: its three founders have decided the future is collaborative rather than competitive. Glimcher, for example, has long argued that the art world’s growth depends on genuine innovation, and is now betting that progress will come not from relitigating old rivalries, but from recombining strengths.

The obsession with competition has gotten us into a low margin, high overhead arms race that benefits neither the artists nor the clients, he told ARTnews in an email. Pace, Di Donna, and David have pioneered a collaborative model which embraces the art world networking relationships. That s the future. PDS is positioning itself as a structural solution to a structural problem.

In a statement, Schrader, who spent a decade building Sotheby’s private sales engine, said he sees PDS as a “strategic and structural response to a market that has outgrown its old architecture.” Di Donna brings museum-grade connoisseurship from one of the most sophisticated secondary-market galleries in New York. Pace supplies global spaces, deep estate relationships, and a half-century of institutional credibility. PDS is not a merger. Their gallery, as Di Donna put it in a statement, is “a holistic experience” that brings auctions, private sales, collection building, finance, and institutional relationships under one roof.

The model raises an intriguing possibility: perhaps this is what innovation might look like at the upper end of the market. An allergy to cooperation has long been one of the weaknesses of that part of the sector. If PDS succeeds, it may buck that pattern.