News

This winter, we celebrate major exhibitions and presentations by globally acclaimed artists in our native Switzerland. Experience a landmark exhibition by Gerhard Richter at the Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, a presentation of Rita Ackermann’s first-ever frieze work at Le Grand Bellevue Gstaad, and exhibitions by Fausto Melotti, Lorna Simpson and Cathy Josefowitz in Zurich.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our fourth decade with a constellation of events in Los Angeles—a world city that is both a major American cultural capital and a prime source of inspiration and energy for the gallery since its founding in 1992. To mark the moment, the gallery will debut exhibitions and public programs spanning LA from its Downtown Arts District location in the converted historic Globe Mills complex, to its new space in the heart of West Hollywood.

Announcing ‘Art for Better,’ an online auction with important works donated by gallery artists to raise funds for the humanitarian aid programs of UNHCR. Bidding will open 6 December and run through 13 December, with 100 percent of proceeds going to support life-saving assistance to victims of global refugee crises that have displaced millions.

Focusing on four outstanding artists, our Art Basel OVR:2020 presentation features a total of 24 works, each live to view for 24 hours only. The paintings and drawings by Rita Ackermann, Phyllida Barlow, Jenny Holzer, and Mika Rottenberg give a unique insight into the work that each artist has created over recent months and the themes which emerge from this period of intense creative focus. Contact us for more details about works featured in our OVR:2020 presentation.

We are thrilled to introduce ‘Artists for New York’, a major initiative to raise funds in support of a group of pioneering non-profit visual arts organizations across New York City that have been profoundly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest body of work features a suite of new paintings in which figures and motifs rise to the surface of canvases, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again.

Printmaking is a critical element within the practice of many of Hauser & Wirth’s artists. For some, the blank plate or paper offers a space for pure material experimentation, a liberation from theory, and a return to the raw creative act. Others find comfort and respite in the precision required by the etching plate or the rigid mechanics of the press, which become the antithesis to the ambiguity and accidental nature of paint, charcoal, or clay. The resulting prints offer powerful insights into creative processes and allow viewers to better understand artists’ perspectives on the world.

Melding abstraction and figuration, Rita Ackermann creates works that seamlessly oscillate between presence and disappearance. For La Triennale di Milano, Ackermann exhibits a selection of highly compelling works from her chalk painting series in the most comprehensive presentation of this group to date. The exhibition includes several multi-part installations such as 'Aesthetic of Disappearance' (2014) and 'Meditation on Violence' (2014). The exhibition is curated by Gianni Jetzer, an independent curator in New York and Curator-at-Large at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

Artist’s Choice Summer Film Series is a program of free evening film screenings that will take place on the rooftop of the Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street in June and July.

'Rita Ackermann’s 'Hip-Shot' is a graceful, yet savage composition of large scale oil and wax paintings, silhouetting a woman’s profile in a classically arranged manner that is conveyed through abstract emotions rooted in contemporary conceptual perspectives.'

On the heels of her recent solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, we invited Hungarian-born painter Rita Ackermann to record a conversation with an artist of her choice.

There is a scene in Uli Edel's 1981 film, Christiane F.-We Children from Banhof Zoo, in which Christiane F., going through withdrawal, pukes all over the room and her boyfriend. The film tips, for a second, toward Otto Muehl-type grotesquerie, only to reel back in with Christiane folding into a fetal position. This could be a scene in one of Rita Ackermann's early works, if we delete the boyfriend and recede the withdrawing junky to the background while multiplying her three or four times as she undertakes multiple simultaneous activities.

Paintings such as ‘Cold Turkey with Bon Bons’, 1993, and ‘We Mastered the Life of Doing Nothing’, 1994, are filled with idling and pubescent ‘cat-eyed nymphs’ (a descrip­tion they can't shake, now that it's been repeated to no end), undressed or on the way there, shooting up or doodling in their notebooks or on the phone or barfing through withdrawal. The paintings are landscapes of late-adolescent ennui, stills from a road movie of runaways trying their luck away from the little provincial towns they've finally man­aged to flee.

It's a narrative of taut young bodies attempting to carve a refuge out of the edges of the world to which they've been sentenced, to negotiate an Outside-as much a place as an impinging force that rubs raw the edges of everything, not least those of painting itself.