About
With its first exhibition in the New Year, the Galerie Hauser & Wirth is celebrating its tenth anniversary. This group show will present works of all the artists represented by the gallery: Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Richard Jackson, On Kawara, Rachel Khedoori, Guillermo Kuitca, Paul McCarthy, John McCracken, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Roman Signer and Diana Thater.
The first location of the gallery, in 1992, was an art nouveau villa in the middle of Zurich. There the partners, Ursula Hauser and Iwan and Manuela Wirth, bought and sold works of art, concentrating on modern art. The splendid rooms were opened to a wider public twice a year, offering exhibitions of sculpture and painting by Joan Miró and mobiles and gouaches by Alexander Calder.
In 1994, the gallery opened additional exhibition rooms (which no longer exist) in the industrial district of Zurich, which was then emerging as a new centre of the city’s cultural life. This move indicated a shift in focus towards contemporary art. The gallery’s new preoccupations resulted in shows like Paik’s “Jardin illuminé”, “10 Years Parkett – 61 Artists’ Editions” and two exhibitions of the work of Gerhard Richter.
In 1996, the gallery moved entirely into a former brewery building in the industrial district. This marked the start of a regular programme of changing public exhibitions and the beginning of the collaboration with the artists represented by the gallery today. Hauser & Wirth see themselves a partners of the artist, offering them organisational assistance and advice and comprehensive support with large-scale projects, most of them outside the gallery’s own rooms.
The gallery has also recognised the importance of publishing, having a share in the German art book publisher, Oktagon, with Walther König.
1998 saw the gallery joining in partnership with Eva Presenhuber, who opened the Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber in the same building. In New York, where Hauser & Wirth had collaborated closely with gallerist David Zwirner since 1992, they opened Zwirner & Wirth on 69th Street.
The show, “Ten Years Galerie Hauser & Wirth”, is not intended as a nostalgic retrospective of the past ten years, but a snapshot, an overview of the artists represented by the gallery. It offers a view of the wide-ranging programme, uniting as it does personalities and generations of artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois and Jason Rhoades. Thus, the show may yet evoke a bit of nostalgia as it recalls memories of more than 150 exhibitions, at the gallery or elsewhere, in which Hauser & Wirth were involved.
About the artists
Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled…
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One of the most important American artists of his generation, Dan Graham first emerged in the 1960s, alongside artists such as Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, as an influential pioneer of Conceptual Art and performance-related Video Art. His multi-disciplinary practice – which…
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Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, Mary Heilmann ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation. Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Heilmann’s practice overlays the analytical geometries…
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A pre-eminent figure in American contemporary art since the 1970s, Richard Jackson is influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, exploring a performative painting process which seeks to extend the potential of painting by upending its technical conventions. Born in Sacramento,…
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Australia-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography. Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001. Khedoori is known for…
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Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca’s distinctive cubistoid style masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration. Informed by the worlds of architecture, music, theater and cartography, Kuitca’s paintings seek…
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Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting…
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Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s. Astounding the art world with the…
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Anri Sala represents a truly contemporary international vision: working in a range of media including video, photography and installation, Sala was educated in Albania and France, but now lives and works in Berlin. In his films and installations, Sala invites viewers to…
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Swiss artist Roman Signer has been redefining sculpture for more than 40 years and is now regarded as one of the finest representatives of Process and Conceptual art. He produces elementary dynamic sculptures and installations, also known as time sculptures for their preoccupation with the…
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For over two and a half decades, Diana Thater has explored the precarious relationship between culture and nature in her new media practice. Frequently using animals and natural phenomena as subjects, her precisely choreographed video installations immerse the viewer in ambient environments…
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Born in 1936, Eva Hesse was one of the icons of American art in the 1960s, her work being a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. Comprehensive solo exhibitions in the past 30 years as well as a retrospective that toured…
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Jason Rhoades (1965 – 2006) is known for monumental, room-filling installations. These idiosyncratic sculptures incorporate a wide range of objects including products of mass culture combined with hand-made items and biographical references. Drawing on the history of assemblage, Rhoades imbues his materials…
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