Schimmel. (PMC)

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.

Hauser & Wirth, which is based in Zurich, also runs galleries in London and New York where, two months ago, they opened a brand new, 23,000-square-foot space in the Chelsea art district. Earlier this month, Hauser & Wirth’s London branch opened the gallery’s first exhibition with popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby. On March 19, in conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery hosted a conversation between Mr. Ruby and Mr. Schimmel at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.

Mr. Schimmel would not be the first high-profile museum professional to join the commercial side of the art world. In 2007 Lisa Dennison, then deputy director at the Guggenheim Museum, took a job with Sotheby’s. More recently, John Elderfield, curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern Art, took on a consulting role with Gagosian Gallery.

For its part, Hauser & Wirth would stand to gain a well-respected name in the international art world. At MoCA, Mr. Schimmel was responsible for critically lauded exhibitions like 1992’s “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 90s” and, more recently, “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981” which took place last year under the banner of the Pacific Standard Time exhibition series. He curated the exhibition "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines," which appeared at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006.

Dan Duray, Michael H. Miller and Andrew Russeth contributed reporting.

'Fire By Days Blues X,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

“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.

The image appears in the majority of the 17 works in her show, a smiling, clown-like head in profile, with huge eyes, a long nose and a smile that looks benevolent or menacing, depending on how she’s handled it and, in part, the kind of mood you’re in. But the image is also the silhouette of a woman, maybe nude, dancing, throwing her hip into it. Both people are there, like a messy, erotic version of Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck. Except there’s also the chance there may be nothing there. Only deep, spectral pools of color.

Ackermann. (Jason Kempin/WireImage)

“Sometimes I like when the gestures disappear—the brushstrokes, and gestures disappear—and it’s more just a well-conducted chaos of stains,” Ms. Ackermann said. She starts with her canvas unstretched so that she can work it hard with sponges, brushes and her hands. She made the most recent painting in the show (Fire By Days Blues X, 2013), which is more than nine feet tall, just two weeks before the opening. It’s even more abstract than the others. “This one was really pushing through itself very fast," she said. "Didn't let me have too much time to think about [it]...between each take.”

If you’re familiar with her work, meeting Ms. Ackermann is a fairly surreal experience, because she appears—or at least some version of her appears—as a character in many of her best-known paintings and drawings. She’s there as the almost-identical almond-eyed young girls in underwear, lounging, talking on the phone or quite literally navel-gazing in her earliest works from the first half of the 1990s. The character has appeared repeatedly since then, at different ages and in (often erotic) poses and guises. In person, she’s warm and energetic and laughs frequently. She took off her jacket as we talked and pulled on her hoodie’s hood, stretching her legs as we toured her show. She looked like a boxer getting ready for a fight.

'Negative Muscle,' 2010. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

When Ms. Ackermann moved from Hungary to New York in the early ’90s (she still has a trace of an accent), she fell in with an arty downtown crowd and alternated between fashion projects, art-making and playing in various noisy bands. There are a lot of stories, though she prefers not to talk about that period, wanting to focus on her new stuff. She’s in the midst of a sea change, maybe the biggest yet in a career that has seen plenty, moving from various kinds of relentlessly grotesque imagery—dense packages of images and marks—into a raw, unsettling abstraction. The final line of Gilbert-Lecomte’s poem talks of “A brushstroke / Signifying absence.”

The title of the show, “Negative Muscle,” shares the name of a 2010 canvas that augured her stylistic change. She made it after finishing a collaboration with the filmmaker Harmony Korine that had her painting over parts of some of his film stills. A headless cartoonish body stands near the center of that painting, only half visible, as if the other side of its body has slipped into the ether, erased by the smears and smudges that surround it. It’s a picture of a body coming undone.

'Air Possessions,' 2012. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

“For the first time, it felt like I was not trying to compress everything into one painting. I would let space do its own free will,” Ms. Ackermann said of that pivotal work. “I was getting tired of my own information, started listening more to the liberated painting. The violence almost disappeared in this one, because of it being so left alone.”

Ms. Ackermann fights with her paintings. “I try to work on my paintings until they are unworkable...it does not always mean that they’re finished,” she said. “Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. It could happen that I push one over the edge. If that happens the painting might burn out.” But right before that happens, she flips the painting over to see if anything interesting has bled through to the other side, as happened in Air Possessions (2012). She’ll add a few patches of color, but otherwise leaves things radically blank, made through only the few chance remnants of her efforts.

'Without a Body,' 2010. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Lately, plenty of young painters have been smudging up their canvases, aping work that Ms. Ackermann and some other influential artists, like Josh Smith and Joe Bradley, were making a few years ago. “It is an aesthetic that makes people feel comfortable with the work,” she said disdainfully, as we examined a piece from that period, Without a Body (2010), in which her almond-eyed girls return, one in heels puffing a cigarette. “That’s one thing I do not want, to make a painting that will make the viewer feel comfortable.” She's called such work “designer art.”

Shifting between mediums and styles over the years has won Ms. Ackermann her share of detractors, and some brutal reviews. She’s channeling the old tropes of the heroic painter, battling the canvas, trying to make something new, throwing herself into the work. The fact that she’s a woman doing that probably doesn’t help. “I’m not very popular that way with the trends,” she said, when I asked her about upcoming shows. “I’m not very often asked by institutions.” She was looking forward to starting on new paintings. “I’m just happy when I’m working,” she said. “Because not working is just too much thinking.”

“I see my practice as an ongoing practice,” she added. “There is not an end to it. There is a show, and then there is maybe, hopefully another show and hopefully another show. There will be always something different developing, not necessarily for better or worse. And it’s going to be finished when I die.”

arusseth@observer.com

Dieter Roth, 'Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower),' 1994. (Courtesy the artist and 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.

With the grave panache of a magician turning out his pockets and rolling up his sleeves, Mr. Roth skipped over the middle term of transformation or simplification that ordinarily links a sensual to an intellectual experience to make the concrete abstract directly, by sheer force of will. The Floor I (1973-1992) and The Floor II (1977-1998) are two 19-by-40-foot sections of wooden floor—pulled out of Mr. Roth’s studio in Mosfellsbaer, Iceland—tipped up on their sides and braced together to form a tall, narrow tunnel; the 1965/66 No Title (Bananas), a long brown smear, was made by running bananas through an etching press on white linen; and Mr. Roth’s four profoundly heartbreaking 1980s “Clothes Pictures” are glue-covered assemblages of the artist’s own clothing on plywood, with shoes frozen as if in mid-stride. Surrounded by these still-humming paintings, prints and installations, the younger Roths continue their forebear’s work with two large installations of their own: New York Kitchen, an area just beyond The Floor where, for the length of the show, they will cast busts of Dieter in chocolate and glinting colored-sugar lions to add to his 1994 Selbstturm (Self Tower) and Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower), filling the gallery with the heavy smell of chocolate; and New York Bar, the latest iteration of an ongoing Roth practice, which eighty-sixed all service shortly after the opening but will remain on permanent display. The audience never really participates, but you have to make them think that they do. (Through April 13)

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

“Things being destroyed and rebuilt is inherent to most natural cycles,” Ms. Barlow said on Monday afternoon in the gallery, as assistants swarmed around her, touching up paint. (Due to Sandy, her flight from London was delayed by several days, slashing their time to install the show in half.) Destroying and rebuilding has long been part of her practice—some pieces in this show are made of materials recycled from older ones.

The mammoth piece at the front, the one that resembles a boarded-up, upside-down house, can also be seen as an abstract painting in space, an arrangement of brightly colored planes. She has made many such house-like structures, and back in 2005 they also happened to find common ground with current events. She recalled listening to a radio broadcast from New Orleans after Katrina. “A man vividly described how, after 10 days, he returned to where he thought his house was,” she said. “He had to wade through waist-high mud. There was a tree he remembered and some remnants, and then he saw this whole tilted structure and couldn’t think what it was, but he recognized it. It was his house, and it was completely turned on its head. His description was not only incredibly moving but incredibly sculptural. There was this conflict between something that was a human tragedy matched by someone giving one of the most incredibly eloquent descriptions of what sculpture is as an experience—of walking around and discovering aspects of a structure that you knew incredibly well, but you’d never seen it that way before.” She paused. “There is a conflict—a moral conflict about using things that have an enormous, painful significance.” Another pause. “The subject I’m involved in is the sculptural experience.”

Rendering of Sean Kelly Gallery's new Toshiko Mori-designed space on 36 Street. (Sean Kelly)

“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 22^nd 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. In fact, business appears to be better than ever for a few galleries—and it’s not hard to guess which ones. This fall and the months following, Friedrich Petzel, Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, The Pace Gallery and Hauser & Wirth, are set to engulf the West Side with a wave of new galleramas: stadium-scale exhibition centers with square footage stretching into the tens of thousands and calendars filled with blockbuster exhibitions.

This is the new Chelsea gallery scene—where competition has gone beyond survival of the fittest and evolved into a full-fledged superspecies. Even in the digital age, when business can increasingly be done online—and the art-fair era, when a large proportion of selling is done on a whistle-stop tour of the fairs that have sprung up around the world—an expansionist few insist that not only do brick-and-mortar galleries still matter, but that bigger is better.

“It has to do with some of our artists, and that the nature of what they are doing requires larger spaces,” said Marc Payot, vice president of Hauser & Wirth, which is opening its second New York location in the 23,000-square-foot former Roxy NYC roller disco at 511 West 18th Street.

There, visitors are likely to see more of Roni Horn’s big glass blocks and cylinders, Paul McCarthy’s towering sculptures and Dieter Roth’s “very large” installation-sculpture hybrids, 8 to 10 of which are tentatively slated to christen the new gallery. “This simply could not be shown in a small place,” Mr. Payot said of the show. “We want to be able to show an artist’s full range.”

The new space of Friedrich Petzel Gallery on 18 Street. (Friedrich Petzel)

Friedrich Petzel, who is doubling the size of his current home with a second gallery just down the block from the new Hauser & Wirth, echoed this sentiment. “The artists are the ones in command of this,” he said. Vivid natural lighting and an exclusive location were two concerns that Mr. Petzel had been hearing from his artists, so he signed a 10-year lease on a gallery with a full-roof skylight and a comparatively desolate locale, 456 West 18th Street.

“The artists like the idea of not having too many neighbors. It’s not a shopping mall; it’s about them and their work,” he said.

Indeed, satisfying artists may be a more vital business practice now that elite galleries routinely face off to sign the top earners. In the past two years, Sean Kelly snagged Alec Soth from Gagosian, Pace won Yoshitomo Nara from Marianne Boesky and Friedrich Petzel poached Dana Schutz from Zach Feuer.

Or take this summer’s very public stealing of Thaddeus Ropac’s thunder. The Paris dealer had announced that Anselm Kiefer would inaugurate the opening of his second gallery in that city this October. Six weeks later, he was hit with the news that Gagosian Gallery had decided that it would open its new Paris space, also this fall, with its own exhibition of works by Kiefer. (Adding insult to injury, Kiefer called Gagosian’s space “so inspiring you can envision the artworks in it immediately.”)

“The good galleries are having trouble keeping their artists unless they can offer them a global platform or a space that’s magnificent,” said art adviser Wendy Cromwell.

Over at Pace, communications director Andrea Glimcher has figured out a way to up the gallery’s architectural impact without adding a fifth New York outpost. Instead, Pace is moving its 22nd Street gallery—whose current building will soon become home to the Dia Foundation’s Manhattan branch—into a new 4,000-square-foot building at 508 West 25th Street, directly adjacent to its existing gallery.

“What’s great is that it’s next door and allows us to use it as a single gallery or to connect the two spaces into something larger,” Ms. Glimcher said. Together, the spaces consolidate into a single, 8,000-square-foot gallery. The first show, however, an exhibition of new works by Lucas Samaras opening Sept. 27, is being held in the single new gallery.

Some observers have attributed this fall’s mega-gallery boom to a bifurcation of the market that favors its very highest and lowest ends. “There’s so much money pointing to the very top end, where you have the wealthy looking to hedge against inflation. It’s always risky to expand your business, but I think these are calculated bets that the market will support multiple platforms,” said Ms. Cromwell.  “These are big brands trading on their reputations to a certain degree.”

Indeed, “brand” is at times a better descriptor than “gallery” these days. It used to be that only a global conglomerate like Sotheby’s or Christie’s had the resources for large-scale secondary-market business, such as the liquidation of a major private collection or estate.

But in 2008, Gagosian Gallery challenged this model by purchasing Ileana Sonnabend’s collection of Andy Warhols for $200 million. That same year, David Zwirner, along with Iwan Wirth, purchased 155 postwar works from the collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs. The price was never disclosed, but Sotheby’s reaped $96 million for selling just 33 works from the trove.

It has been suggested that Mr. Zwirner’s success in selling off the Lauffs collection helped him land the coveted Donald Judd estate in 2010. That year, with his secondary-market business booming—and with 40 contemporary artists crowding his roster—he purchased an $8 million parking garage at 537 West 20^th Street to become the site of his fourth gallery in Chelsea. Architect Annabelle Selldorf designed a new five-story, 30,000-square-foot building—the first LEED-certified gallery in New York—expected to open late this November with an exhibition by Judd and Dan Flavin.

“Like so many other galleries, we all need more physical exhibition spaces for our artists,” said Zwirner publicist Julia Joern in an email, adding that the new gallery “exemplifies an ongoing commitment to creating truly beautiful large-scale exhibition spaces for our artists, all with extraordinary natural light.”

Kelly. (Ben Polsky)

But for each new mega-gallery that pops up in Chelsea, a dozen others seem to disappear or move to locales more congenial to their activities. At the high end, there’s Sean Kelly, who is trading in his 6,500-square-foot gallery on West 29th Street, already on the far northern reaches of the neighborhood, for a space even farther north, on 36th Street, formerly home to the nonprofit Exit Art. It will cost him about $50 per square foot, compared to the $100 to $150 price-tags he was finding in central Chelsea. “It seemed like an absolute no-brainer,” he said.

To fill the new Toshiko Mori-designed space, which opens Oct. 27 with an Antony Gormley exhibition, Mr. Kelly has gradually added a half-dozen artists to his roster, including Kehinde Wiley and Terence Koh. “Artists are looking for bigger and better spaces,” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s what they love.”

But perhaps the sweetest part of the deal? Mr. Kelly signed an 18-year lease. “We would never have gotten that in Chelsea,” he said. “This is a lease that will basically see me through my professional career in the city.”

As real-estate adviser Mr. Bateman put it, “A lot of the landlords are hedging on the future with shorter-term leases because they envision the High Line as being the next West Broadway or Madison Avenue.”

The new Hauser & Wirth, for instance, can’t undergo any major renovations because its 10-year lease includes a clause allowing the owner to terminate the agreement in as few as six years if the building finds a buyer. As a result, Mr. Payot said he’s more concerned with just “turning the space into a functional gallery. We’re treating it like a big project space, not a glamorous white cube.”

Of course, it’s the small galleries, particularly those on upper floors, that have been most trampled by the rising rents. Prices tend to be somewhat uneven among Chelsea’s large multifloor buildings, but a few key sites have raised rents upward of 30 percent in recent years. Around two-thirds of the upper-floor galleries have disappeared or fled to cheaper pastures since 2007, according to Rice & Associates.

And apart from early colonizers like Matthew Marks and Paula Cooper (and Larry Gagosian, who reportedly paid just $5.75 million for his 24th Street space when he bought it from the Gambino family in 1999—a steal given how values have since escalated in the neighborhood) very few dealers own property in Chelsea. Mounting office and residential competition makes space even more scarce. Between now and the end of the year, developers are expected to add about 600 new luxury rental units to a 12-block radius in Chelsea.

“Real estate was the biggest factor,” said Michael Foley of his eponymous gallery’s recent move from Chelsea to 97 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side, where he pays about the same price per square foot for a ground-floor space as he did for the second floor on 28th Street. In the cheaper corners of the Lower East Side, around Ludlow and Orchard, galleries can get ground-floor property at about $30 to $50 per square foot.

“As the bigger galleries take up more space, it makes us find space on the outskirts of Chelsea, the upper floors, or on streets that are not that populated by galleries,” Mr. Foley said.

Shifting demographics play a part as well. Chelsea’s Horton Gallery is adding a third space next month in the Lower East Side because, as owner Sean Horton put it in an email, “Increasingly the lack of smaller galleries in Chelsea makes it a less interesting place to be. It’s a great destination for museum-quality exhibitions, but there’s less sense of discovery there now.”

But while there are many similarities between late-stage Soho and Chelsea, there’s still reason to doubt that real estate will win the battle. “There’s a lot of hype, but I wonder how much of a real contribution the High Line is making,” Mr. Bateman said. “Sure, there are two to three million new visitors, but do they get off? Do they really patronize the galleries? It closes before dinner, so the restaurants don’t benefit.”

His solution is for the city to offer tax credits to landlords housing small galleries, like the abatements it gives to the film industry. But, for now, the more humble dealers are rapidly losing faith in Chelsea. The supersizing galleries, on the other hand, might be onto something—in an uncertain market, perhaps the most valuable product of all is confidence.

editorial@observer.com

Christoph Büchel, "1% (Jacob)," 2012. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

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.

It certainly seemed possible. Mr. Büchel is known for interventions—often uncredited—that vary from being rather sweet (he turned one of Hauser & Wirth's London galleries into a fully functioning community center) to sort of obnoxiously funny (he installed a sex club at the Vienna Secession museum in a room with a Klimt frieze once deemed pornographic) to fairly annoying and messy—let us not forget his wildly ambitious installation project at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Mass., which ran overbudget and past deadline, was opened to the public by the museum while the show was incomplete (without the artist's permission) and resulted in a lawsuit over artists' rights that stretched on for years.

A request for comment from Frieze and the gallery more or less confirmed the rumor, and included a few more details and clarifications. According to a press rep associated with Hauser & Wirth, galleries employees paid between $350 to $500 for each of the six carts that are installed on the grounds of Frieze. The project is called "1%" and each cart is named after its former owner: 1% (Albert), 1% (John), 1% (Joe) and so forth.

According to the representative, the title of the piece refers not only to Occupy rhetoric, but also the percentage of the U.S. population that will be homeless at some point in a given year, about 3.5 million people.

This being an art fair, the carts are for sale, ranging in price from $35,000 to $50,000—one percent of what each homeless person was paid for the cart. If the works sell, the artist and Hauser & Wirth will receive the money, and the artist will put his cut toward realizing a homeless parade—a parade of homeless people—in New York. He's said to be organizing it in collaboration with homeless organizations and a New York art institution.

Assuming you believe the artist's story—that he actually bought these works from homeless people and didn't construct them himself—it's a fairly detestable work. Sure, their former owners made a fair-market deal (some reportedly declined the offer to sell their belongings) and walked away with some cash they didn't have before, and yes, they couldn't sell their own belongings for $50,000—or gain access to a forum like Frieze in which they might be able to do that. But still, detestable.

That said, the work is really not a bad object lesson in the way art and money collide at an art fair. Tens of millions of dollars of art will sell during the five-day run of Frieze New York. Some of that money will eventually make its way into various charities, but most of it won't. It probably could have been spent in more socially productive and meaningful ways.

I'd prefer that Mr. Büchel take his cut of sales of this particularly stark example of an art-fair transaction and donate it to a homeless charity rather than stage a parade (though it could very well start a conversation about the increase in homelessness in the city in recent years, so we'll ultimately have to wait for the end result). But that's not the way that art and its markets function today. As has been said before, we get the art we deserve. Will collectors now step up to buy it?

Update, May 5: The section about the artist's planned Mass MoCA show was updated to reflect the development of the project and the legal rulings that emerged from the resulting legal case.

TUESDAY, MAY 1

"Science on the Back End" at Hauser & Wirth
The artist Matthew Day Jackson selects five artists--Larry Bamburg, Marc Ganzglass, Rosy Keyser, Erin Shirreff and Nick van Woert--gives each of them their own room in Hauser & Wirth's Upper East Side location. As Mr. Jackson states in the press release: "I am not a curator. I merely selected the five artists for this exhibition and left to them the decision of which artworks to present. These artists inspire me." --Michael H. Miller
Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: “Lucian Freud Drawings,” at Acquavella
On May 1, Acquavella Galleries will present “Lucian Freud Drawings,” the most comprehensive exhibition of the late artist’s drawings ever to be shown in the U.S., including intimate portraits of family and friends as well as landscapes, many of which were selected from Freud’s sketchbooks and have never before been seen. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Aquavella, 18 East 79th Street, New York, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2

Opening: Noam Rappaport at James Fuentes
Mr. Rappaport makes relentless invention look easy. He makes each his (usually) spare paintings—hardly an adequate term here—with just a few components: perhaps a slab of wood, an unusually shaped swath of canvas, some touches of paint. Those elements become bewilderingly complete and handsome works that stretch strangely across walls or jut out magically into space. Fans of no-more-than-necessary artists, from Blinky Palermo to B. Wurtz, will swoon. —Andrew Russeth
James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain," at Petzel
For her first outing at Petzel, Ms. Schutz makes her characters "build a boat while sailing it, ignite themselves, pass on a contagious yawn, flash the audience with various craft-making tools and play a concerto in the rain," according to the gallery's (frankly tantalizing) news release. No doubt more of her inimitable pleasures await. Schutz fans can visit the Metropolitan Opera's Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery through May 12 to catch her "Götterdämmerung" show of watercolor monoprints informed by Wagner's opera of the same name. —A.R.
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Ryan McGinley, "Animals" and "Grids," at Team Gallery
Ryan McGinley has two new shows opening simultaneously at Team Gallery, "Animals" and "Grids."  For "Animals," Mr. McGinley took studio portraits of marmosets and parakeets. But as these are Ryan McGinley photos, the animals are posed with nude models. This coincides with "Grids," another opening of Mr. McGinley’s work at Team Gallery’s Wooster Street space, featuring three large grids composed of portraits of fans taken at concerts.—R.J.
83 Grand Street, and 47 Wooster Street, New York, 6 p.m.

Party: MoMA PS1 Opens Frieze
The party will include "a full concert by Martha Wainwright, including renditions as Edith Piaf, original songs, and a climactic tribute to Kraftwerk." Given how climactic those performances at the museum already were, this should, in so many words, be a good party. — Dan Duray.
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City

THURSDAY MAY 3

Opening: Courtney Love, "And She’s Not Even Pretty," at Fred Torres Collaborations
You know Courtney Love as a musician, actress and wife of Kurt Cobain. You may not know the Hole front-woman studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980’s. Apart from practicing celebrity as an art from, she’s also been drawing throughout her life and will be presenting her work for the first time. Whether or not David LaChapelle and Julian Schnabel are her mentors, which they are, Ms. Love’s foray into visual art is going to be a celebrity shit show. —R.J.
Fred Torres Collaborations, 527 West 29th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.


SATURDAY MAY 5

Opening: Tauba Auerbach, "Float," at Paula Cooper Gallery
Tauba Auerbach's much-anticipated first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery will include words from the artist's "Weave" and "Fold" series, as well as new photographs and sculptural objects. --M.H.M.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Kehinde Wiley "An Economy of Grace" at Sean Kelly Gallery
Painter Kehinde Wiley branches out with his first ever portraits of women. For the clothes, he's collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of Givenchy, and of "Watch the Throne" cover fame. — D.D.
Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

A digital announcement from Hauser & Wirth. (Courtesy Hauser & Wirth)

Sometimes a gallery just nails it. Presented without further comment, Hauser & Wirth's official electronic announcement for its second New York space, on West 18th Street in Chelsea, which Gallerist reported last night.

511 West 18th Street

Last week, The Observer's Dan Duray published a comprehensive profile of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, on the occasion of its imminent expansion into a larger space in New York. The gallery has just announced the location of that new branch: it will be at 511 West 18th Street in Chelsea, and it will open this fall.

The 23,000-square-foot space—it will rival the massive Gagosian Gallery space on 24th Street and 11th Avenue—was originally constructed in the 1930s as a working stable and garage. It later became the Roxy roller skating rink and discotheque. A press release from the gallery highlights that the space is accessed by a 20-foot-wide interior ramp and will have "soaring ceilings"; clearly it will be able to accommodate very large artworks, something that was not possible at its uptown branch, in a townhouse on East 69th Street, which the gallery has operated since September, 2009. The gallery also has spaces in London and Zurich.

"New York is the world's art capital and its cultural ecology is unlike that of any other city," Iwan Wirth said in a statement. "It offers the world's largest audiences, which are extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated, along with the highest concentration of great museums, galleries, alternative spaces and arts organizations. We are excited to expand our capabilities as a social and cultural shop in such a rich, dynamic, creative environment. Hauser & Wirth's entire global team is delighted and honored to be able to increase our participation in the life of New York City, and to create another special destination where the public can engage the work and ideas of the artists we represent."

The gallery plans to continue to operate its current New York branch uptown. Both locations will be under the direction of current New York director Marc Payot.