Book Launch: The Inner Mirror: Conversations with Ursula Hauser, Art Collector

Kunstmuseum and Kunstverein St.Gallen are pleased to invite you to the book launch of the publication ‘The Inner Mirror: Conversations with Ursula Hauser, Art Collector' at the Lokremise, St.Gallen. The book is published by Scheidegger & Spiess and is presented in cooperation Hauser & Wirth Publishers. In the 1980s, Ursula Hauser began quietly building what’s become one of the world’s most impressive private collections of modern and contemporary art—acquiring works from visionary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Carol Rama, Alina Szapocznikow, Franz West, and many others—and in 1992, she co-founded one of today’s most important galleries, Hauser & Wirth. This book presents the first-ever extensive and intimate account of her life and art collection. To define the works found in Ursula’s collection is a matter of identity, one that is fused to her personal trajectory—from her early years in eastern Switzerland, where she was born in 1939, to becoming a mother, helming her father’s intrepid electronics business, and starting an art gallery with her daughter and son-in-law. Family has always been the steady axis around which Ursula’s life orbits; for her, the artists she collects belong to that same magnetic locus. To understand Ursula Hauser’s collection is to know the collector and chart the course of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century art. The event will take place in the presence of the collector. The launch will be conducted in German   About the speakers Loredana Sperini is an artist who lives and works in Zurich. She has been closely associated with Ursula Hauser since the beginning of her career. Albert Oehlen is an artist who lives and works in Gais. His exhibition ‘unfertig’ will be shown at the Lokeremise from the 6 July 2019. He is seen as one of the most important exponents of experimental painting. Michaela Unterdörfer is Publisher at Hauser & Wirth Publishers and previously led the Hauser & Wirth Collection. Laura Bechter is the curator of the Ursula Hauser Collection. Together with Konrad Bitterli, Bechter has curated exhibitions in the Lokremise which were based on loans from Ursula Hauser, including: ‘Human Capsules – Acht Künstlerinnen aus der Sammlung Ursula Hauser’ (2012), ‘Phyllida Barlow – Mix’ (2015), ‘Paul McCarthy’ (2016) and ‘Body Doubles’ (2017).