Hauser and Wirth Los Angeles to Head West

Hauser & Wirth has announced that it is opening a new space in a repurposed vintage-car showroom on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Comprising 5,000 square feet of exhibition space and an on-site restaurant, the gallery will be Hauser & Wirth’s seventeenth gallery and its second in Los Angeles, where it has since 2016 operated a 116,000-square-foot gallery in a former flour mill in the Downtown Arts District.

“Since the beginning, we always thought of LA as a city where we would love to have more than one location,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot told The Los Angeles Times. “We really expect LA to come back to its full bloom after the pandemic, and this is really the next step for us. It’s first and foremost a commitment to LA.”

The new gallery, which is slated to open in the fall of 2022, is being designed by Selldorf Architects principal Anna Selldorf, who designed Hauser & Wirth’s first purpose-built gallery, at 542 West Twenty-Second Street in New York. The structure will retain its vaulted wooden ceilings and street-facing glass front as well as its original 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival–style white stucco façade and red tile roof, which are emblematic of the neighborhood’s architecture.

Hauser & Wirth additionally operates multiple outposts in New York, Zurich, and Somerset, UK, as well as individual galleries in Southampton, New York; London; Gstaad and St. Moritz, Switzerland; Hong Kong; Menorca and Hernani, Spain; and Monaco. In reaffirming its faith in the burgeoning arts scene, it joins blue-chip rival Gagosian, which earlier this year leased space in the city’s former Marciano Museum, a 110,000-square-foot former Masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard.