Gallery to Inaugurate Its Second LA Space in West Hollywood with a Major Exhibition of New Work by George Condo
Original Downtown Arts District Complex to Debut New Exhibitions, Public Programs and Performances, While Frieze LA Stand Celebrates Los Angeles Artists
Los Angeles…Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce that it will launch its fourth decade with a constellation of events in Los Angeles – a world city that is both a major American cultural capital and a prime source of inspiration and energy for the gallery since its founding in 1992. To mark the moment, the gallery will debut exhibitions and public programs spanning LA from its Downtown Arts District location in the converted historic Globe Mills complex, to its new space in the heart of West Hollywood.
Marc Payot, President, Hauser & Wirth, said:
‘Our new space in West Hollywood is a manifestation of Hauser & Wirth’s deep commitment to Los Angeles and a love affair with the city that stretches back to the gallery’s earliest days, 30 years ago. In that time we’ve come to know LA through our relationships with our many extraordinary artists and estates based there, as well as our ongoing dialogue and collaboration with the city’s outstanding curators, writers, collectors and colleagues. We have been enchanted and influenced by the city’s defining contradiction: LA is a global arts capital with an almost monolithic presence in the collective imagination, but at the same time it’s a collection of distinctive communities, each with its own personality and rhythm.
‘Our goal in LA – as in New York, Zurich, and other places where we work – is to participate in those rhythms, to bring our art and artists into contact with the people who create local culture,’ Payot continued. ‘So, just as our Downtown Arts District location has animated its historic site Globe Mills site and become a neighborhood energy center since opening in 2016, our new location aims to become part of the vibrant life of West Hollywood. We’re thrilled to begin our fourth decade by expanding our presence in this city we love and inaugurating this second space with an exhibition of new works by George Condo, one of the great American artists of his generation, channeling the unique spirit of Los Angeles.’
West Hollywood, Los Angeles
On 15 February, Hauser & Wirth will inaugurate its second Los Angeles gallery, at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, with an exhibition of new paintings by celebrated American artist George Condo. With the exhibition’s title ‘People Are Strange’ taken from the hit 1967 song of the same name by legendary – and quintessentially Los Angeles – band The Doors, Condo’s latest canvases are filled with fragmented portraits and abstractions that echo LA’s sublime dissonance. In these large-scale works, the artist renders layered, vibrating planes, lines and geometries that seem to suggest a world of oppositional forces and states, at once solemn and euphoric, connected and entropic, logical and ineffable, beautiful and ugly. In their ability to convey such deep contradictions through Condo’s masterful approach to the medium of painting, the works on view mirror the incongruities and ineffable, seductive power for which the sprawling city of Los Angeles itself is duly famous.
‘People Are Strange’ finds Condo offering up impressions of the strange world around him and, in doing so, capturing something universal about the human condition and the transforming effects of time’s passage.
Hauser & Wirth’s new venue in West Hollywood will occupy the site of a vintage automobile sales showroom where a white stucco façade and red tile roofing typify the distinctive 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival style of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The location has been transformed into a 5,000 square foot exhibition space by architect Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects. It will welcome Angelenos at the crossroads of the Design District, ‘Historic Boys Town’ and Beverly Hills. With vaulted wood truss ceilings and expansive windows onto the street, this new site encourages synergy between the gallery’s program and the bustling energy of the lively cafes, legendary music venues, and leading interior design and retail boutiques that make West Hollywood a famously vibrant and storied creative center.
In creating this second LA space, Hauser & Wirth seeks to extend its commitment to a city and cultural community that have been integral to the gallery’s vision and program since its founding 30 years ago in 1992. Los Angeles artists represented by Hauser & Wirth include Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Richard Jackson, Rachel Khedoori, Paul McCarthy, Christina Quarles, Gary Simmons, Henry Taylor, Diana Thater, and the late artists Luchita Hurtado, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades.
February in Downtown Los Angeles
Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Arts District location will host ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by the renowned Chinese artist, featuring a series of monumental, abstract landscapes presented harmoniously within the distinctive soaring space of the South Gallery. Zeng Fanzhi’s intuitive approach to the canvas is evident in his bold, expressionistic abstractions evoking natural phenomena. Rendered with a dynamism and exquisite palette, these paintings echo the magnetism and perceptual impact of 20th century color field painting but with a distinctively 21st century aura. Heralding Zeng Fanzhi’s latest technical breakthroughs, the works on view initiate the artist’s use of bright, saturated fields of color to define a painting. A seemingly vast expanse of hues, closer inspection of each surface reveals a delicate interwoven palette of vivid pigments. This exhibition marks the latest in Hauser & Wirth’s ongoing series of Los Angeles presentations conceived to introduce the city to the oeuvres of foremost international contemporary artists, further forging connections across geographical and cultural territories.
February will also find celebrated Hungarian-born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann debuting a new body of work at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles Arts District complex. On view in the North Gallery, ‘Vertical Vanish,’ Ackermann’s first exhibition with the gallery on the West Coast, will unveil large scale gestural oil paintings that synthesize line, color and form. Repeated figures and motifs emerge and then disappear again within fields of saturated color achieved through the artist’s actions – drawing, painting and erasing. Oil, china maker and acrylic are heavily worked into the surface of canvas and raw linen whereby figures are lost and lines are scraped away to reveal shattered compositions. Ackermann’s latest works present a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form.
