Pace Gallery Bets on William Kentridge and a Climate-Curatorial Turn with “AlgaeBTQ+”

On 27 June 2026, Pace Gallery opened William Kentridge: AlgaeBTQ+ across its 540 West 25th Street flagship in Chelsea, the South African artist's first major New York survey with the gallery in several seasons and one of the most explicitly climate-curatorial exhibitions the blue-chip sector has staged this year. The title is doing a lot of work at once — a nod to algal bloom as both ecological signal and pigment source, and a quiet reference to queer ecologies that has already migrated from the press release into the wider art internet. Pace, in its framing, is pitching Kentridge as a figure who can carry the gallery through a moment when the market is openly asking whether painting and sculpture still have anything to say about a warming planet that is no longer metaphorical.

The premise is straightforward, and not new in form, even if the timing is unusually pointed. Kentridge has spent four decades building a practice out of charcoal, animation, opera, and the slow accumulation of drawing-as-thinking. AlgaeBTQ+ threads that body of work together with a new commission cycle built around water, decay, and the visual language of bloom. The gallery's argument, as relayed by Hyperallergic in its 27 June newsletter, is that the blue-chip gallery of the late 2020s cannot keep selling abstraction-as-displacement and expect to remain culturally central. Something has to be shown, not just said, about the rooms the artworks hang in.

What the show actually does

AlgaeBTQ+ occupies three floors of Pace's Chelsea building, with the densest new work — kinetic sculptures, projected drawings, and what the gallery describes as "algae-based" materials — clustered on the second level. The curatorial spine is Kentridge's longstanding interest in process and residue: drawings made to be erased, films that loop back on themselves, and a new set of charcoal animations responding to the hydrology of Johannesburg's mine-belt water system, where cyanobacteria have turned what was once a freshwater supply into something closer to industrial effluent.

The gallery has been careful to position the show as continuation rather than rupture. Kentridge's dealers and longtime collaborators, including the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, have framed his work in similar ecological terms for years; Pace is not inventing the lane, it is widening it. The financial subtext, not spoken on the wall labels but visible in the way the show is staged, is that an artist who can credibly claim forty years of working through environmental collapse is a useful counterweight to younger market darlings whose climate language has, fairly or not, started to read as branding.

The counter-narrative

The art press's response has split in the way it usually does when a major gallery stages a statement show. One reading, surfaced by the memes Hyperallergic flags in the same newsletter, treats AlgaeBTQ+ as a sophisticated packaging exercise: a beloved elder statesman recruited to make a 12,000-square-foot Chelsea interior feel timely without materially disrupting Pace's primary-market business in postwar and contemporary blue-chip inventory. The premise of that critique is that galleries like Pace are responding to climate anxiety among collectors rather than to climate reality among anyone else, and that the appropriate response is skepticism dressed as aesthetic analysis.

The contrary read, and the one this publication finds more persuasive on the evidence currently available, is that Kentridge's own practice has earned the framing. He has been drawing about water, mining, and the residue of extraction across the entire period during which those subjects became unspeakable in polite gallery conversation, and the show is doing the work of bringing a slow-built body of material into a programmatic frame it was always pointing toward. The risk for Pace is real — the gallery is taking a deliberate hit on wall space that could have gone to inventory with a faster secondary-market churn — but the upside is reputational, not transactional.

A structural turn, in plain terms

What is interesting about this show is less Kentridge's individual work and more what it signals about the gallery sector's posture. Over the past two seasons, the largest commercial galleries have been quietly recalibrating their flagships around climate-adjacent programming: more video, more time-based media, more commissioned essays, more events framed around ecology rather than markets. The pivot is partly generational — younger collectors and their advisors are asking questions about provenance, materials, and the carbon ledger of art fairs that older clients did not — and partly defensive, as galleries seek to inoculate themselves against the kind of culture-war framing that has been creeping into the U.S. political discourse around museums and public funding.

Pace's bet with AlgaeBTQ+ is that a recognized name, a serious body of work, and a curatorial frame that does not feel bolted-on can carry that turn without the show collapsing into a content-warning panel. The meme economy around the show, already busy in the days after the opening, suggests the gallery has at least managed to make the conversation legible to people who do not normally read art press. Whether that is a win or a warning sign is genuinely contested.

Stakes and open questions

The immediate stakes are commercial: Pace needs AlgaeBTQ+ to draw a sustained audience through the summer and to move enough secondary-market Kentridge to justify the inventory freeze implied by the gallery's flagship program. The longer stakes are about the gallery sector's broader claim to relevance at a moment when the visual culture of climate is being made everywhere except in the rooms where it is sold. If a show like this works, it ratifies a model in which a major commercial gallery can stage serious climate-curatorial work and still clear its primary-market calendar. If it underperforms, expect a quiet retreat toward the safer programming of the early 2020s and a rescheduling of the climate conversation to the non-profit sector.

The evidence so far is mixed in the honest sense. Hyperallergic's newsletter reports the opening as a curatorial event of note, but does not provide attendance figures, sales totals, or critical reviews from the major broadsheets, and those numbers are what will actually determine whether Pace repeats the formula. The art market's rule of thumb is that a successful statement show produces at least one wave of serious critical writing within two weeks of opening; that wave has not yet crested for AlgaeBTQ+ as of 27 June 2026. This publication will watch for it.

This article treats Pace's framing as one input among several, leaning on Hyperallergic's 27 June 2026 newsletter for the curatorial spine while flagging where the gallery's marketing line and the sceptics' read diverge. Where sales, attendance, or critical reception data are not yet in the record, it has been left out rather than estimated.