HAUSER & WIRTH AND ZWIRNER ANNOUNCE NEW GALLERIES

While many galleries are paring down the number of exhibitions they present, shrinking their staffs, or closing altogether, Hauser & Wirth––a seventeen-year-old business that operates exhibition spaces in London and Zurich––has decided to open a gallery in New York, reports Carol Vogel for the New York Times. It will be primarily devoted to artists it represents, an international group that includes Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Subodh Gupta, and Paul McCarthy. “The economic crisis is not stopping us,” said Iwan Wirth, one of the gallery’s founders. “This is a long-term strategy.” For several years now, it has had office space in Manhattan at 32 East Sixty-ninth Street, in a building where Zwirner & Wirth is located. (Zwirner & Wirth, which mostly handles modern masters, is owned in part by Iwan Wirth and the New York dealer David Zwirner.) Hauser & Wirth will now take over all four floors of the building, and Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect, will design the space. (Zwirner & Wirth will no longer have a gallery in New York, but David Zwirner will open his own space at 524 West Nineteenth Street in the fall.) When Hauser & Wirth opens in September, it will be showing Yard, an environment created by Allan Kaprow, the artist who coined the term Happenings in the 1950s and who died three years ago. Yard_, from 1961, consists of a massing of used automobile tires.