One of the world’s biggest high-end art galleries is betting big on Silicon Valley.
Hauser & Wirth, the powerful Swiss mega-gallery, will open its first Northern California location this spring, not in San Francisco but in downtown Palo Alto. The gallery will be inside a 2,600-square-foot former post office at 201–225 Hamilton Ave.
Many in the local art world suspect the reason for opening in Palo Alto is to be closer to Silicon Valley clients; specifically, Laurene Powell Jobs and her Emerson Collective offices, which are just two blocks away from the new gallery. Powell Jobs, who has a net worth of $14.3 billion, is rumored to be one of Hauser & Wirth's top clients. In 2022, she withdrew support for Pace Gallery shortly before it closed its Palo Alto location and moved her business to Hauser & Wirth.
The gallery renovation will be led by Paris-based Luis Laplace — the same architect designing Powell Jobs’ renovation of the San Francisco Art Institute.
The Swiss juggernaut is setting up shop just two doors down from the former Pace Gallery. It will be the third Hauser & Wirth in California; the others are in Los Angeles.
“Northern California occupies an equally powerful position [as Los Angeles] as home to a fantastically dedicated community of collectors and the museums they have built,” gallery president Marc Payot said in a statement.
Silicon Valley is home to a bevy of the world’s top art collectors, according to ARTnews, including Marc Andreesen, Larry Ellison, Komal Shah, and SF Mayor Daniel Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas.
Hauser & Wirth is the first top-drawer gallery to bet big on the region since the exodus of Gagosian from San Francisco in 2021 and Pace Gallery from Palo Alto in 2022. Those closures led to hand-wringing over the Bay Area’s status in the international art world.
In response to Gagosian’s exit in 2021, Pace president Marc Glimcher told The Art Newspaper that the Bay Area is "not a place that responds to grandiose braggadocio — the trappings of power and exclusivity.”
Some say it makes sense to have a high-end gallery in the Peninsula to cater to collectors who would otherwise have to fight through 101 traffic to get to San Francisco.
“It’s harder to engage those collectors who live down in the Peninsula when it takes an hour to get into a cocktail or lecture or book reading in the city,” said Andrew Lueck, a vice president at Christie’s San Francisco. “Sometimes you have to bring the mountain to Mohammed. I think that’s what a lot of organizations are doing, is meeting people where they are.”
With 17 galleries and counting, Hauser & Wirth is one of the biggest and most influential galleries in the world, with a reputation for building out more than just white walls to hang art. The galleries, in international jet-set haunts like Menorca, Monaco, SoHo, West Hollywood, and London, often are set in sprawling compounds with gardens and acclaimed bookstores and restaurants.
Laura Sweeney, who has worked as an art adviser in San Francisco for more than 13 years, said Hauser & Wirth will enhance the Bay Area art scene.
“This move means more shows, it means more artists, and more opportunities for collectors,” she said. “Hauser has been such an extraordinary supporter of the institutions in the Bay Area, and they work closely with the curators here. They come to FOG, and they don’t just bring old inventory, they bring great new works.”
In fact, the gallery had the largest reported sale at this year’s FOG Design + Art fair: a painting by Avery Singer that went for $575,000. The gallery also facilitated loans from collectors to SFMOMA’s much-loved “Amy Sherald: America Sublime” show.
Hauser & Worth’s opening could signal a renewed vitality in the Bay Area art scene, which has recently experienced both notable successes and significant losses, amid a contracting market and ongoing challenges for institutions trying to regain pre-pandemic attendance.
The real challenge will be whether Hauser & Wirth succeeds where its rivals Pace and Gagosian failed.