Goodman Gallery Cuts Back to Rebuild Its Model

Why Goodman Gallery is retreating from the grow-fast script

Goodman Gallery has spent most of the past two decades looking like one of the rare expansion stories strong enough to survive every art-market mood swing. Founded in Johannesburg in 1966 and reoriented under owner Liza Essers after 2008, the gallery built a serious transnational business around artists such as William Kentridge, El Anatsui, Shirin Neshat, and Carrie Mae Weems. That made its latest turn all the more revealing. As Artnet reported, Essers decided that rising revenue was no longer enough when costs were rising faster and profitability was thinning out underneath the headline numbers.

The gallery's own public positioning helps explain the stakes. On its official about page, Goodman presents itself as a globally engaged platform rooted in the Global South, with spaces in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, and New York and a curatorial program built around long-view institutional credibility. That identity is expensive to maintain. Travel, shipping, art-fair fees, staff, real estate, and the hidden cost of carrying inventory all punish galleries long before a sale goes through. For years, scale looked like the answer. In 2026, scale increasingly looks like a stress test.

Essers's comments are blunt enough to matter beyond one business. She says Goodman pulled back after a stretch of poor fair results, including a bad Art Basel and a sequence of weak outings in London, Singapore, Miami, and San Francisco. That is not a minor tactical correction. It is a break with the assumption that ambitious galleries must keep showing up everywhere in order to signal strength. In practice, the old model asked galleries to spend heavily just to prove they belonged in rooms where collectors now arrive more cautiously and buy more selectively.

What the numbers say about the current gallery squeeze

The most useful part of the story is its specificity. According to the figures cited by Artnet from U.K. filings, Goodman increased revenue from about £28.5 million to £35.3 million between 2023 and 2025, yet profits in 2024 fell 58 percent to roughly £2.1 million. That gap between turnover and retained earnings is where a lot of gallery mythology falls apart. Growth can still produce weaker businesses if every added fair, office, and payroll commitment multiplies fixed costs faster than reliable demand.

This is why Goodman matters as a case study. Plenty of galleries have quietly reduced staff or cut back on fairs, but very few offer enough transparency to show what the underlying math looks like. In the same week that Goodman framed its reset, the trade was also processing the contraction of other once-expansive operations, including Pace's roster and staffing cuts and Templon's retrenchment in New York. artworld.today has already tracked that logic in pieces like our report on Pace's correction. What looked like isolated decisions now reads as a structural pattern.

There is also a geographic dimension. Goodman is one of the few galleries that has tried to remain deeply tied to South Africa while competing in the same market circuits as London, New York, Basel, and Miami players. Essers told Artnet that shipping, travel, and currency pressures were part of the squeeze. That detail matters because the market often praises “global” participation while making it disproportionately expensive for galleries operating outside the main Western hubs. The cost of symbolic presence is not equally distributed.

The new Goodman model: advisory, ecommerce, and secondary sales

Goodman's answer is not to shrink into pure defensiveness. Instead, the gallery is moving toward a broader service model. Essers says the business is investing in an overhauled digital platform with ecommerce, advisory work, and a larger secondary-market arm focused on what she calls blue-chip Global South material. In other words, Goodman is trying to turn expertise into recurring revenue rather than relying so heavily on primary-market exhibition sales and fair-by-fair swings.

That pivot is more radical than it first appears. Galleries have long provided advisory informally, especially for top clients, but presenting it as a visible operating pillar changes the balance of the business. The same is true of ecommerce. The official Goodman site already frames the gallery as a platform rather than a simple white-cube venue, and the new direction pushes that logic further. A checkout system that handles shipping, taxes, and remote payment is not glamorous, but it directly attacks the friction that keeps many mid-market sales from happening at all.

The secondary market component may prove the most consequential. If a gallery can place high-value works by historically important artists it already knows deeply, it can build margin and client stickiness without bearing the same production and exhibition burdens attached to a large active roster. There is a risk here, too. Expanding secondary sales can gradually reshape a gallery's identity, nudging it toward dealing and away from artist development. But in a softer market, that may be precisely the compromise more galleries choose.

Why the rest of the sector should pay attention

Goodman's reset matters because it breaks the code of polite silence that galleries often maintain around weakness. The sector likes to speak in terms of momentum, openings, and packed fair aisles. It says much less about unprofitable scale, the drag of global logistics, or the difference between prestige and resilience. Essers is effectively saying that survival now depends on refusing some of the rituals that once signaled ambition. That makes this story less about one gallery's difficulties than about a recalibration of what success looks like.

Collectors should read the move carefully. A gallery cutting fairs or reducing roster size is not automatically in freefall. Sometimes it is the opposite: an attempt to stop subsidizing spectacle and build a business that can actually support artists over time. The key question is whether the pullback comes with a coherent plan. In Goodman's case, the answer appears to be yes. The gallery is pairing retrenchment with specific new revenue channels, a clearer digital strategy, and a more disciplined view of where its expertise gives it leverage.

For artists, the message is harsher. Representation in 2026 looks less like an ever-expanding ladder and more like a portfolio management problem. Galleries will keep asking which relationships truly pay for themselves, which fairs actually convert, and which forms of visibility are mainly vanity costs. Goodman Gallery remains influential, and its institutional self-description still carries weight. But its course correction tells the truth the market would rather avoid: prestige without margin is not a strategy, and even historically important galleries now have to rebuild from that fact.

Another overlooked part of the Goodman story is how it changes the conversation about digital competence. Galleries have spent years treating online sales as auxiliary, something to preserve for lower-priced work or emergency conditions. Essers is effectively arguing the opposite: that operational fluency online is now part of high-end survival. A collector who can complete a purchase cleanly, understand taxes and shipping instantly, and communicate with staff in real time is less dependent on the ritual theater that fairs once monopolized. That convenience will not replace relationships, but it can make relationships more scalable.

There is a cultural implication, too. Goodman built its reputation by giving artists from South Africa and the wider Global South a serious, sustained platform in markets that often tokenize such perspectives. If the gallery can preserve that mission while changing its revenue mix, it could become a model for other mid-to-large galleries facing the same squeeze. If it fails, the lesson will be just as sharp: even prestige operations with a distinctive program may struggle to keep mission and margin aligned in a market that still rewards spectacle more easily than patience.

The gallery's choices around physical space are worth watching closely. Essers told Artnet that exhibition square footage in Cape Town and Johannesburg will be reworked to create more private rooms for advisory and secondary-market activity. That sounds technical, but it signals a real shift in how galleries imagine their public. More square footage dedicated to discreet transactions means less faith that open exhibition programming alone can carry the business. It is a move from visibility as the main engine to relationship management as the main engine.

None of this makes Goodman less significant. If anything, it makes the gallery more legible. The sector is moving out of an era when international expansion could be mistaken for proof of health. What collectors, artists, and rival dealers should take from this reset is that the galleries most likely to endure may be the ones willing to look less triumphant in public while becoming more disciplined in private. That is not glamorous, but it is often what real durability looks like.

What makes the Goodman case unusually valuable is that it forces the sector to separate two ideas it has lazily fused together: visibility and health. A gallery can be visible everywhere and still be structurally overextended. It can stage museum-quality exhibitions, maintain international outposts, and carry prestigious artists while watching profits erode under the surface. Once that distinction becomes obvious, the old prestige metrics look far less convincing. The galleries that come through this cycle strongest may not be the loudest or the largest, but the ones that learn how to convert reputation into repeatable business without exhausting themselves in the process.