The empire of Hauser & Wirth continues to broaden, with the announcement at present (30 July) that it’ll open a location subsequent spring in Palo Alto, in northern California.
Hauser & Wirth’s Silicon Valley house might 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 world hospitality firm, Artfarm, that operates resorts, bars and eateries, a few of them contained in the gallery’s areas.)
“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 most of the distinctive artists we characterize,” 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 power centre for our artists and the neighborhood.”
The brand new house might 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 in addition characteristic a bookstore.
Hauser & Wirth just isn’t the primary mega-gallery to try to strike gold within the Bay Space. When Tempo opened its house in Palo Alto in Might 2016—the primary international gallery model to take action—the transfer was heralded as a promising try and convert the area’s tech moguls into the subsequent 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 huge wealth—it has extra billionaires than anyplace else on the planet—the area lacks a sizeable cohort of worldwide galleries or a significant artwork truthful, not like 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 principle.
