Category: Gallerist
Nationality: Swiss
Last Year: 3

Hauser & Wirth will shortly be celebrating 20 years in business, and it hasn’t been a bad couple of decades, all told. A new space opened 12 months ago in London’s Mayfair that looks beamed in from New York’s Chelsea, and a serious programme that steadily establishes rather than chases trends – picking up Phyllida Barlow, for example, and then coaxing her to produce what was unquestionably the exhibition of her career – complete the picture of a gallery snapping at Gagosian’s heels. Then there was Christoph Büchel’s Piccadilly Community Centre in the same venue this summer, which transformed the gallery – floor to ceiling, and in all kinds of hidden nooks – into a working drop-in centre and suggested that Hauser & Wirth, besides being a dealership, is enacting some kind of para-artistic enquiry into the limits of overhauling its own interior architecture.

On the other hand (and necessarily, because God knows what Büchel’s project cost), Wirth knows what sells. He’s lately taken on Ron Mueck, showing him at Basel this year, and tirelessly prolific sculptor Thomas Houseago. And the gallery is hardly unaware of eastward power shifts: witness its recent New York showings for Zhang Enli and Subodh Gupta. Bases? Covered, thanks.

Yet that’s only one aspect of what’s going on here. The gallery continues to intervene in art history: this year it mounted the first major show of Lee Lozano’s tool paintings and drawings in New York and showed Dieter Roth in London.