News

A powerful new public artwork by Jenny Holzer, ‘HURT EARTH,’ will illuminate UK landmarks from 29 October 2021, drawing attention to the climate crisis and coinciding with COP26, the 26th annual United Nations summit on climate change.

In November 2022, Hauser & Wirth will stage the second part of a trilogy of exhibitions curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Dedicated to Fontana’s extraordinary experimentation in sculpture, this tailor-made presentation will take place at our uptown location, Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street, the very same building where in 1961 Fontana’s first solo shows in the United States were held concurrently at the Martha Jackson and David Anderson galleries. These exhibitions, critical to introducing Fontana’s work more deeply to American audiences, followed the artist’s inclusion in the relevant 1949 exhibition ‘Twentieth-Century Italian Art,’ curated by James Thrall Sobey and Alfred H. Barr Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art, where his work remains a highlight of the permanent collection.

At a recent General Assembly meeting, the Royal Academy of Arts elected Ellen Gallagher and Pipilotti Rist as Honorary Academicians. The announcement of the two artists as new Honorary Academicians comes alongside the election of Amanda Levete as a Royal Academician in the category of Architecture.

On what would have been her 101st birthday, we remember the artist who, over the course of 80 years, resolutely committed to documenting the interconnectedness of human beings, nature, and terrestrial life. The Estate of Luchita Hurtado is launching a call for submissions for inclusion in the artist’s forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné.

ClientEarth is a non-profit organization that uses the law to create systemic change that protects the Earth for—and with—its inhabitants. ClientEarth tackles climate change, protecting nature and stopping pollution with partners and citizens around the globe.

This fall, do not miss the debut of Hauser & Wirth artists’ new, immersive, and historic work in galleries and museums across Los Angeles, one of the most vibrant art cities in the world. From Mid-City to Downtown, explore spellbinding video installations by Pipilotti Rist, get lost in abstracted sculptural forms by Paul McCarthy, experience new video works by Diana Thater, and witness Amy Sherald’s historic portrait of the first lady Mrs. Michelle Obama, before it travels to its next destination in The Obama Portraits Tour.

An exhibition of works by Hans Arp titled ‘Arp: Art is a Fruit’ will launch the gallery’s new space at Bahnhofstrasse 1 on 17 September, in Zurich’s historic central cultural district. Helmed by Partner and Executive Director, James Koch, the space will focus on exhibitions by the 35 artists’ estates represented by the gallery and will be a headquarters for Hauser & Wirth’s increasing private sales activity.

A destination to experience art in connection with education, nature and conservation, Hauser & Wirth Menorca is located on an island in Mahon harbour, comprising eight galleries in the repurposed 18th century outbuildings of a naval hospital. ‘Art is at the heart, but it is also a deeply inclusive model’, says Iwan Wirth. ‘It is a holistic concept that, by nature, is community-based.’

With summer in full swing, plan a trip or experience some of our spaces and exhibitions from home. Our new galleries in Menorca and Monaco are now open and feature never before seen works by Mark Bradford and Louise Bourgeois respectively. Below is a list of exhibitions open to the public this summer in each of our locations.

This summer Hauser & Wirth artists will present a number of significant outdoor sculptures across five gallery locations globally. The international presentation features a new sculptural intervention by Phyllida Barlow encompassing the central open-air courtyard at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, as well as Hauser & Wirth Menorca’s recently launched sculpture trail integrated into the landscape of Isla de Rey, featuring the work of Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Chillida, Joan Miro and Franz West.

For his first exhibition in Spain, Mark Bradford presents an installation of globe sculptures, a site-specific wall painting, and a suite of new canvases based on a sixteenth-century map of the world thought to feature the first use of the name ‘America’ in print. Opening 19 July, ‘Masses and Movements’ extends across seven gallery spaces. Integral to the exhibition is a new social engagement project that Bradford is collaborating on to bring arts education to immigrant communities and a display that highlights the global immigration crisis. Continuing his career-long exploration of the systems that oppress marginalised populations, Bradford’s newest exhibition features work rich in both formal and allegorical complexity, reasserting the importance of abstraction to understand the world we live in and confirming his place among the most important artists working today.

The third episode in a special series of conversations from Shade, supported by Hauser & Wirth, is with artist Thomas J Price.

Thomas J Price has rapidly become one of the most important British contemporary sculptors of his generation, subverting stereotypical representations of figures we value in society and traditional power structures. After studying at Chelsea College of Art, he completed his MA at the Royal College of Art in 2006 and began further interrogating the language of monumentalism to question the status inherent in public sculptures. Much of his work engages ideas of representation and perception, challenging existing historical narratives and reappropriating power. Price has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton (2014), National Portrait Gallery, London (2016) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2019). This July he will take up post as artist-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset ahead of his inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery in October 2021.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) announces that Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles joins MOCA’s Board of Trustees.

We are proud to partner with Dartington Arts School by supporting a student on the ‘Arts and Place’ MA course, starting April 2022 until January 2023. The Gustav Metzger Foundation Scholarship will be eligible to a student with refugee status or have an application for asylum in the UK. The gallery’s support will include tuition fees for the one-year course, living expenses and associated residency location at Hauser & Wirth Somerset for two weeks. This unique collaboration is part of Hauser & Wirth’s ongoing commitment to providing opportunities for equal access to higher education, whilst working to establish meaningful connections that continue Gustav Metzger’s legacy and vision.

Pipilotti Rist has conceived the site-specific light installation ‘Seelenlichter (Soul Lights)’ for the opening presentation at the Casa Gstaad chalet. In this artistic intervention, natural light floats through tinted windows, transforming the mountain chalet into a universe of its own. The artist perceives each window as both an eye to the soul and to the outside world, offering a moment of reflection and contemplation in joyful multicolour. Rist has used this kind of intervention for museum exhibitions for over 20 years, explaining that ‘the window becomes one big pixel and is no dark hole anymore’.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is firmly embedded in the local community and rural landscape of Somerset. Since its launch in 2014, the rural arts centre has supported and worked in partnership with many institutions, businesses and organisations in the South West, raising over £120,000 for local charities. ‘Each year we select a new local charity to support through entrance donations and seasonal events, providing a platform to promote ongoing initiatives to a broad audience,’ says Debbie Hillyerd, Director of Education Hauser & Wirth. ‘In the wake of COVID-19, we decided to share contributions between three local organisations, each delivering vital social, health and cultural initiatives to the surrounding community.’

The second episode in a special series of conversations from Shade, supported by Hauser & Wirth, is with art historian Michael Ohajuru.

An exhibition featuring new work by Roni Horn is on view through 24 October at at Château la Coste in Aix-en-Provence.

Marc Payot announced today that the gallery will expand its Los Angeles presence with a second location opening Fall 2022 in West Hollywood, a cultural and geographic hub of America’s second largest city. The new venue will occupy the site of a vintage automobile sales showroom at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard, where a white stucco façade and red tile roofing typify the distinctive 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival style of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Born in Chicago in 1985, Christina Quarles has achieved wide acclaim for her exploration of bodily experience—from the weight and gravity of the physical world, to the pleasures and pressures of societal existence—in vivid, enigmatic paintings teeming with limbs, torsos, and faces reconfigured into new forms. Brought to life through painterly gestures and an unexpected palette, the artist’s scenes suggest the different ways in which race, gender, and sexuality contribute to the coalescing of identity. Quarles’ work spans drawing, painting, and installation, and embraces the permeability of the constructed form. As a queer, cis-woman born to a Black father and a white mother, she has described her position of engagement with the world as ‘multiply situated,’ an experience of embodiment reflected profoundly in her sui generis art.

The first episode in a special series of conversations from Shade, supported by Hauser & Wirth, is with Silas Munro—LA-based critic, writer and partner of graphic design studio Polymode.

Beginning 14 May, the gallery will present ‘We Were Already Gone’, an exhibition at our West 22nd Street location in the Chelsea Arts District, organized in collaboration with Hunter College. Curated by graduate students in Hunter’s Department of Art & Art History, this exhibition will showcase the work of artists currently enrolled in the school’s MFA Program in Studio Art.

We are pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition and private viewing space in Monaco on the Côte d’Azur. The inaugural exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois. Maladie de l’Amour’ opens on 19 June 2021. A monumental public sculpture from the French American artist’s Spider series, a bronze arachnid over three meters tall, will be installed in the gardens adjacent to the gallery.

In a special presentation at Hauser & Wirth Publishers HQ, ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp & Hans Arp: Cooperations – Collaborations’ brings together a selection of rare artist publications by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp from the collection of Daniel Segmüller and Ruth Seiler. The selected books and portfolios on view, made during the Dada movement onwards, celebrate artists coming together to forge new ideas in the face of challenging times. The collection features early examples of artistic collaboration in Dada Zurich with figures such as Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck, as well as the work of celebrated modernist figures such as Max Ernst, Max Bill, Sonia Delaunay, and Alberto Magnelli. Original copies of Taeuber-Arp’s magazine ‘Plastique/Plastic’ are also on view in the presentation, which coincides with the major travelling retrospective ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction’ at the Kunstmuseum Basel, organised in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The display in Zurich follows several collaborative projects with renowned collectors who share Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ passion for artists’ books, recognising their importance within artists’ practices and legacies.

Born in New York City in 1964, Simmons has achieved wide acclaim over the past three decades for a profound and energetic practice that explores notions of race, class, social stereotypes, and politics through painting, sculpture, sound, and architectural environments. Simmons’ work considers the influence of the past upon the present, grappling specifically with the unfixed nature of memory and the American penchant for revising or even replacing personal and collective experience. Best known for illustrative paintings in which white outlines of figures and words—20th century cartoon characters steeped in the racist traditions of minstrelsy, disappeared architectural sites, vintage film title cards, evaporating clouds of smoke, twinkling stars—are painted on chalkboard-like surfaces, then blurred and smeared by hand. Through this signature ‘erasure’ technique, Simmons has uniquely captured the effect of history being altered while its energy continues to shape life in the present day. As the artist has stated, ‘When you attempt to erase something, there's always a trace left behind.’

Widely recognized as one of the most important and influential American artists of her generation, Cindy Sherman has since the late 1970s made powerful images of an ever evolving panoply of adopted personae in order to explore key issues of identity and its construction, and to question assumptions about artistic representation. Over the course of her four-decade career, she has created works that challenge, in particular, the contradictory depictions of women that shape our culture’s expectations and support its stereotypes. Her inventive and physically demanding work has unfolded in discrete series, each one engaging and upending familiar strains of visual history that range from Renaissance and Classical portraiture, to the unlimited supply of images provided by movies, television, magazines, and the Internet.

We are pleased to announce the creation of a new position—Head of Environmental Sustainability—as part of the gallery’s commitment to becoming an art industry leader in environmental practices. Hauser & Wirth CEO Ewan Venters says, ‘Our new global Head of Environmental Sustainability will enable us to take the gallery’s climate action plan forward. In cultivating a more sustainable future for our artists and communities, we are committed to doing all we can to protect the ecosystem and to reduce our environmental impact.’ Venters added that the gallery expects to fill the new position by April 2021. 

Located in the port of Mahon in Menorca, our new art center on Isla del Rey will open on 17 July 2021. An exhibition by Mark Bradford will inaugurate Hauser & Wirth Menorca, featuring a dynamic suite of new paintings and sculptures. A dedicated education programme has been developed to engage both the local community and visitors in contemporary art through screenings, talks, and workshops.

A new neon work by acclaimed British artist Martin Creed, ‘Work No. 3485 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT’, is lighting up the façade of the Gstaad Palace in Switzerland. The installation is organized by Hauser & Wirth and the Gstaad Palace in an ongoing collaboration, installing iconic artworks by artists from the gallery’s roster since 2019. This year’s special public display is made possible with the generous support of Alex Hank.