Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser founded the gallery in Zurich in 1992. Its West 22nd Street home, designed by Selldorf Architects and opened in spring 2020, was the first space the gallery built for itself rather than converted.
Being purpose-built rather than a reclaimed warehouse, the rooms are unusually tall, and shows lean toward large-scale installation rather than intimate hangs.
Hauser & Wirth was a family business before it was an international one. Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser — Manuela’s mother, and a collector in her own right — started it in Zurich in 1992; Marc Payot joined in 2000 and is now co-president. The geography that followed is unusual for the trade. Alongside the expected addresses in London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, the gallery runs a group of converted farm buildings in rural Somerset and an art center in the outbuildings of an eighteenth-century naval hospital on an island in the harbor at Maó, in Menorca — places nobody arrives at by accident.
The West 22nd Street building is the first the gallery constructed rather than adapted, and the design by Selldorf Architects reads as an argument about what a gallery needs. It is five floors and about 36,000 square feet of column-free rooms behind a dark grey street front of zinc panels and concrete block, the blocks made with recycled waste glass and aggregate. Glass doors stand sixteen feet high at street level and twelve feet on the second floor, and folding doors at the ground floor open the front of the building to the sidewalk.
The telling detail is on the top floor, where an eighteen-foot gallery is fitted with a glazed roof hatch and a square picture window sized to let work be craned in from outside. A building with a crane hatch is a building expecting sculpture and installation that will not go up a staircase or through a freight elevator, and the program follows accordingly.
The gallery handles artists’ estates as well as living artists, which is why a show here can look and feel like a museum retrospective, with scholarship and a catalogue behind it. Entry is free, as at every commercial gallery on these blocks; there is no ticket desk to negotiate.
542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 · Official site ↗
Hauser & Wirth is a contemporary and modern art gallery headquartered in Switzerland. They have gallery locations in Europe, Asia, and North America.
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