The empire of Hauser & Wirth continues to expand, with the announcement today (30 July) that it will open a location next spring in Palo Alto, in northern California.
Hauser & Wirth’s Silicon Valley space will be located in downtown Palo Alto, close to the campus of Stanford University and a short drive from the headquarters of tech giants like Meta and Google. This is the 17th location of the Swiss mega-gallery, which Iwan and Manuela Wirth founded in Zurich in 1992. It joins the gallery’s two existing spaces in California, both in Los Angeles, which opened in 2016 and 2023. (In addition to the global gallery chain, Hauser & Wirth’s founders launched an international hospitality company, Artfarm, that operates hotels, bars and eateries, some of them inside the gallery’s locations.)
“Los Angeles, where we maintain important spaces in the Downtown Arts District and West Hollywood, is a globally recognised hub of cultural production and home to many of the exceptional artists we represent,” says the gallery’s president, Marc Payot, in a statement. “But northern California occupies an equally powerful position as home to a fantastically dedicated community of collectors and the museums they have built. Perched in its prime spot on the edge of the Pacific Rim and populated by generations of astute and ambitious patrons of the arts, the Bay Area is a place where we are proud to be creating a new space, an energy centre for our artists and the community.”
The new space will be housed in a former post office on Hamilton Avenue, which is currently being renovated by the firm of the architect Luis Laplace. It will have around 2,600 sq. ft of exhibition space and also feature a bookstore.
Hauser & Wirth is not the first mega-gallery to try and strike gold in the Bay Area. When Pace opened its space in Palo Alto in May 2016—the first global gallery brand to do so—the move was heralded as a promising attempt to convert the region’s tech moguls into the next generation of art collectors. A month later, Gagosian opened its own outpost in nearby San Francisco. Both galleries have since shuttered their Bay Area spaces: Gagosian closed in 2021, and Pace in 2022.
Despite the Bay Area’s enormous wealth—it has more billionaires than anywhere else in the world—the region lacks a sizeable cohort of international galleries or a major art fair, unlike Los Angeles. Marc Glimcher, the president of Pace, told The Art Newspaper in 2021, one year before shutting the gallery’s Palo Alto space, that the Bay Area is “not a place that responds to grandiose braggadocio—the trappings of power and exclusivity”. Hauser & Wirth will be the latest to test out that theory.
