By Sarah Douglas 3/28 3:56pm

human resources

Schimmel

Paul Schimmel in Talks to Join Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles

Gallerist has learned from several independent sources that Paul Schimmel, former chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, is in late negotiations to join Hauser & Wirth gallery, which, according to sources, plans to open a branch in Los Angeles.

The gallery did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Schimmel has not yet returned a request for comment.

Paul Schimmel and the museum parted ways last summer. His departure brought wide criticism of the already embattled museum, which has been led by director Jeffrey Deitch since June 2010, and occasioned the departure of all four artist trustees. Since Mr. Schimmel left the museum, rumors have circulated in the art world as to where he would go, and there has been talk that several top-level galleries were interested in hiring him. Sources close to Mr. Schimmel have said that he preferred to stay in L.A. He has since been working as a co-director of the Mike Kelley Foundation. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 3/12 5:08pm

artists

fire-by-days-blues-x-2013-1

The Id Stays in the Picture: Rita Ackermann Has Gone Abstract But Hasn’t Lost Her Edge

“I like a sudden appearance, when you look down on the marble bathroom floor, or in wood, and you see a face in it and it is always a different face,” the artist Rita Ackermann said last week. She was standing inside Hauser & Wirth’s Upper East Side gallery, where her latest show just went on view.

A few years ago, Ms. Ackermann, 44, had that uncanny, Rorschach-like experience while she was working in her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She mopped up some paint with a poster and discovered a strange, curvy figure. Since then she’s painted it on many of her canvases, in rich shades of blue or red, and sometimes both. She calls the series “Fire by Days,” a play on a line from a poem by the French modernist Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Read More

By Will Heinrich 2/05 5:07pm

On View

Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower), 1994. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

‘Dieter Roth. Björn Roth’ at Hauser & Wirth

You will first meet Dieter Roth—who is posthumously inaugurating Hauser & Wirth’s massive new gallery on 18th Street with the help and through the agency of his son and collaborator Björn (and Björn’s sons Oddur and Einar)—as a pottering old man, reading, drawing, shitting, showering, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee in the 128 video screens of his 1997-1998 Solo Scenes. Recorded in Mr. Roth’s studios in Germany, Switzerland and Iceland in the year before he died, running in overlapping loops divided by blue screens or black-and-white static, and accompanied by a murmur of clattering dishes and crumpled paper such as you might hear from the kitchen of a large, well-run restaurant, the scenes create a powerfully charismatic illusion of self-revelation. But notice the way that Mr. Roth, when he’s done reading, pulls off a precise length of toilet paper and carefully folds it double, and double again: what makes the work so compelling is the artist’s control, the tremendous sense of process that doesn’t so much imbue the seedy detritus of an incarnate and sensual life with significance as it simply sweeps it all forward, like a mass of glistening turf on a heavy steel cowcatcher. Read More

By Sarah Douglas 11/06/12 5:16pm

artists

'untitled: upturnedhouse' (2012) by Phyllida Barlow. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Picking Up the Pieces: Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth gallery has become difficult to navigate. Chunks of concrete, scraps of burlap and shards of fiberboard all but block passage through the space. An upturned house is wedged in the first room, like a ship in a bottle.

The gallery is on the Upper East Side—this is not the work of Sandy, but rather of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, who makes hulking, vaguely sinister-looking objects from humble materials, and whose artistic practice of many years—she is in her 60s—is eerily resonant with the recent hurricane. Her abstract sculptures—which are evocative of everything from store awnings to sea anemones to tree trunks—are made from the kinds of urban materials we are more likely, this week, to see in piles on street corners, the remains of homes and businesses. Her work has been said to capture the transience of life. Read More

By Rachel Corbett 12:22am

galleries

supersizechelsea

Supersize Chelsea!: In New York’s Main Art District, It’s Go Big or Go Home

“Be careful where you step,” shouted Maureen Bray over a percussion of power tools as she maneuvered past the electricians, sheetrockers and HVAC crew members who have two months to transform a 22,000-square-foot construction zone into the new home of Sean Kelly Gallery, which is about to triple in size. “Obviously this giant hole won’t be here,” said Ms. Bray, a director at the gallery, pointing to what will become a stairwell leading to a black-box theater—just one of three exhibition spaces, alongside expanded offices, a “canyon”-sized library and two private viewing rooms (“back where those toilets are now”).

In the early 1990s, most real-estate-seeking New Yorkers overlooked the gray smudge on Manhattan’s West Side known as Chelsea, then still a wasteland of deserted freight tracks, turpentine fumes and auto-body garages. But for the throngs of art galleries being swiftly priced out of Soho by fashion boutiques and Dean & Delucas, it offered cavernous, column-free architecture at bargain-basement prices.

Matthew Marks pioneered the migration on an abandoned stretch of West 22nd Street. Soon after, Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Sean Kelly and hundreds of other galleries followed, and a “new Soho” was born in Chelsea.

Twenty years, two Gagosian Galleries and a Comme des Garçons later, Chelsea art dealers are fretting that the legacy of Soho has come back to haunt them. About a third of the neighborhood’s galleries have been shuttered in the last five years as High Line-inflated real estate prices and an influx of deep-pocketed fashion and design firms have forced out many of the smaller dealers. At its height, Chelsea was home to more than 350 galleries; today only 204 remain, according to Rice & Associates real estate adviser Earl Bateman.

But it would be premature to pronounce the world’s premier gallery district dead. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/04/12 5:44pm

Frieze New York 2012

1% (Jacob) (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Homeless People’s Belongings as Sculpture at Frieze, Courtesy Christoph Büchel

Yesterday, in the Frieze New York sculpture garden, a shopping cart was parked behind a giant statue of a mustachioed Mona Lisa by Sudobh Gupta. The cart looked a little out of place in the well manicured landscape, especially because  it was filled with plastic and paper bags, some filled with blankets. There was a broom handle and an umbrella in there too, and a plastic bottle of grape juice sat on Mr. Gupta’s pedestal.

The rumor going around the fair was that the cart was placed there by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, who was announced as a participant in the sculpture garden by its curator, Tom Eccles, but whose name was conspicuously absent from the map of the place. The story went that Mr. Büchel had purchased a number of shopping carts from homeless people in New York City and installed them on the sculpture grounds. Read More