The empire of Hauser & Wirth continues to increase, with the announcement immediately (30 July) that it’ll open a location subsequent spring in Palo Alto, in northern California.
Hauser & Wirth’s Silicon Valley house shall 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 present 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 global hospitality firm, Artfarm, that operates accommodations, bars and eateries, a few of them contained in the gallery’s places.)
“Los Angeles, the place we preserve necessary areas within the Downtown Arts District and West Hollywood, is a globally recognised hub of cultural manufacturing and residential to most of the distinctive artists we characterize,” says the gallery’s president, Marc Payot, in a press release. “However northern California occupies an equally highly effective place as dwelling to a fantastically devoted group 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 impressive patrons of the humanities, the Bay Space is a spot the place we’re proud to be creating a brand new house, an power centre for our artists and the group.”
The brand new house shall be housed in a former publish workplace on Hamilton Avenue, which is at the moment being renovated by the agency of the architect Luis Laplace. It is going to have round 2,600 sq. ft of exhibition house and likewise function a bookstore.
Hauser & Wirth is just not the primary mega-gallery to try 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 era 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 huge wealth—it has extra billionaires than anyplace else on this planet—the area lacks a sizeable cohort of worldwide galleries or a serious artwork honest, in contrast to Los Angeles. Marc Glimcher, the president of Tempo, instructed The Artwork Newspaper in 2021, one 12 months 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 concept.
