Marc Glimcher is president of PaceWildenstein Gallery. His father, Arne, who is chairman, founded the company in 1960, along with his mother, Mildred. While he is responsible for the daily operation of the gallery’s three locations in New York City, he is an art historian like his parents, receiving his degree from Harvard University, and influencing the shows and artists presented in the gallery.

THE ART WORLD HAS BECOME INCREDIBLY COMPLEX AND DIVERSE. DO YOU SEE ANY TENDENCIES OR ISSUES THAT ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS, AND IF SO, WHICH ARTISTS REPRESENT THESE?

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There are certainly simultaneous fronts being opened up by artists. One group I have become involved with is concerned with a new way to examine the permutations of systems. Beginning with Michal Rovner and James Siena, we’ve had a number of these artists join the gallery over the last four years. During that time, we have had an amazing opportunity to observe these artists adapting the non-objective, system-based practices of the artists of the 1960s and ’70s, and applying them to the complexities of the natural world, which is a terrible oversimplification of what they are doing. In their works, you see LeWitt’s urge to crystallize being permuted into an urge to expose the complexities and forces at work within the crystal. As a result, all of the source material that the minimalists had to reject in order to develop their systems is now fair game. Representation, emotion and personal history, as well as chance entropy and information theory, are all subject to the systematic processes of these artists.

So the artists are biting off a lot. It is not for the faint of heart. The nature of the work does not allow for cutting corners or taking the easy way out. The resulting “evolutionary pressures,” if you will, have generated a very serious, rigorous group.

Naturally, this approach did not appear fully formed for this generation: There have been artists working at it for decades, such as Kiki Smith, Charlie Ray or Tom Nozkowski. These artists have been experimenting with a kind of “complex minimalism” for years, pitting abstract or arbitrary systems against personal and hermetic ones to create highly varied bodies of work that, nonetheless, exposed common forces that shaped the inner workings of their world. These artists have helped shape a generation that includes artists as varied as Tara Donovan, Tim Hawkinson and Vik Muniz, to name a few.