The empire of Hauser & Wirth continues to increase, with the announcement at this time (30 July) that it’s going to open a location subsequent spring in Palo Alto, in northern California.
Hauser & Wirth’s Silicon Valley house will probably be situated in downtown Palo Alto, near the campus of Stanford College and a brief drive from the headquarters of tech giants like Meta and Google. That is the seventeenth location of the Swiss mega-gallery, which Iwan and Manuela Wirth based in Zurich in 1992. It joins the gallery’s two current areas in California, each in Los Angeles, which opened in 2016 and 2023. (Along with the worldwide gallery chain, Hauser & Wirth’s founders launched a world hospitality firm, Artfarm, that operates accommodations, bars and eateries, a few of them contained in the gallery’s places.)
“Los Angeles, the place we keep vital areas within the Downtown Arts District and West Hollywood, is a globally recognised hub of cultural manufacturing and residential to lots of the distinctive artists we signify,” says the gallery’s president, Marc Payot, in an announcement. “However northern California occupies an equally highly effective place as residence to a fantastically devoted neighborhood of collectors and the museums they’ve constructed. Perched in its prime spot on the sting of the Pacific Rim and populated by generations of astute and bold patrons of the humanities, the Bay Space is a spot the place we’re proud to be creating a brand new house, an vitality centre for our artists and the neighborhood.”
The brand new house will probably be housed in a former put up workplace on Hamilton Avenue, which is at present being renovated by the agency of the architect Luis Laplace. It’ll have round 2,600 sq. ft of exhibition house and likewise function a bookstore.
Hauser & Wirth shouldn’t be the primary mega-gallery to attempt to strike gold within the Bay Space. When Tempo opened its house in Palo Alto in Could 2016—the primary world gallery model to take action—the transfer was heralded as a promising try and convert the area’s tech moguls into the following technology of artwork collectors. A month later, Gagosian opened its personal outpost in close by San Francisco. Each galleries have since shuttered their Bay Space areas: Gagosian closed in 2021, and Tempo in 2022.
Regardless of the Bay Space’s monumental wealth—it has extra billionaires than anyplace else on the earth—the area lacks a sizeable cohort of worldwide galleries or a significant artwork honest, not like Los Angeles. Marc Glimcher, the president of Tempo, instructed The Artwork Newspaper in 2021, one yr earlier than shutting the gallery’s Palo Alto house, that the Bay Space is “not a spot that responds to grandiose braggadocio—the trimmings of energy and exclusivity”. Hauser & Wirth would be the newest to check out that idea.
