Hauser & Wirth expands its already large footprint in Los Angeles

Hauser & Wirth, the global mega-gallery that already has 16 locations around the world, announced that it will be opening a second space in Los Angeles.

The new location will be in West Hollywood, in a Santa Monica Boulevard storefront that was once a showroom for vintage cars. Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects will design the gallery, but it will maintain its wooden vaulted ceilings, as well as the building’s original Spanish Colonial Style stucco façade and red tile roof, a typical architectural look for the neighbourhood.

“Since the beginning, we always thought of LA as a city where we would love to have more than one location,” Hauser & Wirth’s 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 West Hollywood gallery, which aims to open next autumn, will have 5,000 sq ft of exhibition space in addition to an on site restaurant.

While it is not uncommon for Hauser & Wirth to open multiple galleries in the same city—it already has two in New York and three in Zurich, for example—the West Coast expansion is substantial given that Hauser & Wirth already has the largest commercial gallery space in Los Angeles: a 116,000sq. ft complex in a former flour mill in the Downtown Arts District, which easily gices it one of the biggest footprints of any gallery in the city. That may be short lived, however, as other dealers are also expanding in the city, including Los Angeles-born Larry Gagosian, who struck a deal earlier this year to occupy the 110,000 sq ft former masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard that was previously home to the short-lived Marciano Foundation.