Ten Years Hauser & Wirth

Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.

Bourgeois’s work is inextricably entwined with her life and experiences: fathoming the depths of emotion and psychology across two- and three-dimensional planes of expression. ‘Art,’ as she once remarked in an interview, ‘is the experience, the re-experience of a trauma.’ Arising from distinct and highly individualized processes of conceptualization, Bourgeois's multiplicity of forms and materials enact a perpetual play: at once embedding and conjuring emotions, only to dispel and disperse their psychological grasp. Employing motifs, dramatic colors, dense skeins of thread, and vast variety of media, Bourgeois's distinctive symbolic code enmeshes the complexities of the human experience and individual introspection.

Rather than pursuing formalist concerns for their own sake, Bourgeois endeavored to find the most appropriate means of expressing her ideas and emotions, combining a wide range of materials—variously, fabric, plaster, latex, marble and bronze—with an endless repertoire of found objects. Although her oeuvre traverses the realms of painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois remains best known for her work in sculpture.

Bourgeois’s early works include her distinct 'Personages' from the late 1940s and early 1950s; a series of free-standing sculptures which reference the human figure and various urban structures, including skyscrapers. The ‘Personages’ served as physical surrogates for the friends and family Bourgeois had left behind in France, while also highlighting an interest in architecture dating back to her childhood. Her installation of these sculptures as clustered ‘environments’ in 1949 and 1950 foreshadowed the immersive encounters of installation art twenty years before the genre’s rise to prominence.

Bourgeois’s work was included in the seminal exhibition ‘Eccentric Abstraction,’ curated by Lucy Lippard for New York's Fischbach Gallery in 1966. Major breakthroughs on the international scene followed with The Museum of Modern Art in New York's 1982 retrospective of her work; Bourgeois's participation in Documenta IX in 1992; and her representation of the United States at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993.

In 2001, Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to fill the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The Tate Modern’s 2007 retrospective of her works, which subsequently traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., cemented her legacy as a foremost grande dame of late Modernism.

Header image: Louise Bourgeois, ARCHED FIGURE, 1993 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, NY, Photo: Christopher Burke

Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, Mary Heilmann ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation. Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Heilmann’s practice overlays the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat Generation, and are always distinguishable by their often unorthodox—always joyful—approach to color and form.

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Heilmann completed a degree in literature, before she studied ceramics at Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint. While most artists at that time were experimenting with the concept of dematerialization and demanding that painting should avoid any references to experience outside the material presence of the work itself, Heilmann opted for painting, rebelling against the accepted rules. ‘Rather than following the decrees of modern, non-representational formalism, I started to understand that the essential decisions taken during the creative process were more and more related to content. The Modern movement was over…’

Since then, Heilmann has created compositions that evoke a variety of associations. Her work may be non-representational and based on an elementary, geometrical vocabulary—circles, squares, grids and stripes—but there is always something slightly eccentric, casual about them. The simplicity of the forms is played down by a deceptive form of nonchalance: the contours are not clearly defined. In some paintings, amorphous forms appear to melt into each other like liquid wax. Splashes of color can be discerned, sharp edges bleed for no apparent reason, and the ductus of the brushstrokes is always perceptible. Heilmann’s casual painting technique conceals a frequently complex structure that only gradually reveals itself to the viewer.

A pre-eminent figure in American contemporary art since the 1970s, Richard Jackson is influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, exploring a performative painting process which seeks to extend the potential of painting by upending its technical conventions. Born in Sacramento, California in 1939, Jackson first came to international attention with a major presentation of his installation works at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 1988, followed by the 1992 exhibition, ‘Helter Skelter,’ at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.Jackson’s work is process-oriented, and the structural aspect of his installations involves a high level of craftsmanship and engineering. However, the final application of paint is generated through an automated process which Jackson calls ‘activation.’ He equips his ‘painting machines’ with a network of pipes and hoses which, when deployed, cause violent eruptions of paint that immerse the work and surrounding area. The finished installations remain in the aftermath of this extreme and unpredictable performative action.

Jackson responds to the high-mindedness of painterly practice by repositioning painting as an everyday experience. For Jackson, paint is not a tool used to create a representational image, but is used as a ubiquitous liquid which is spurted, splattered and sprayed over the surface of his installations.

He draws on the visual lexicon of domestic environments, universal basic human activities, and hallmarks of the quintessential American life such as hunting and sports. By harnessing this imagery and combining it with a physically laborious and conceptually rigorous artistic practice, Jackson has produced a body of work that questions and challenges the structure of the art world at large for over four decades.

Australia-born, Zurich-based artist Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography. Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001.

Khedoori is known for work that reinterprets the architecture of domestic spaces. She often reconstructs rooms that challenge viewers' perceptual experience by interweaving mirrors, films and scale models into the installation. While the work is noticeably void of any representations of the figure, the viewer's physical presence assumes the role of subject. Khedoori’s small-scale sculptures are often models, which serve as representations of imagined or hidden spaces. Khedoori’s use of the cinematic apparatus as a sculptural form, for example the 35mm film projector, emphasizes tensions at play within her practice. The work conflates or flattens the space between the physical, built environment and the illusory realm of film, suggesting that the distinction between reality and representation have become obscured. Khedoori also utilizes books, film, and photography to symbolize the act of documentation, encouraging viewers to reconsider the conditions of reportage and representation. Her work serves as a metaphor for the instability of memory and challenges viewers to reconsider the boundary between reality and imagination.

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca draws on a range of iconography, including architectural plans, maps, theaters, musical scores and domestic spaces to produce an oeuvre that explores themes of history, memory, structured absence, sound and silence and the tension between the empirical and abstract. Shifting from gestural mark-making to linear precision, Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories, and in the latter half of his career, he has achieved significant acclaim for his deployment of a unique cubistoid style that masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration.

Exhibiting his first paintings at the age of thirteen at Lirolay Gallery in Buenos Aires, Kuitca quickly expanded his artistic practice by also studying drawing and theater direction. Early paintings from the 1980s incorporated theater imagery, informed by his experience in theater production and often explored themes of history, memory, migration, and domestic and communal spaces, before Kuitca later began to integrate architectural and cartographic subjects into his oeuvre. Having established himself as a leading figure in Buenos Aires’s art scene, in 1991—the same year that he founded his studio program in the city for residencies and young artists called Beca Kuitca—he staged his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A year later, he achieved further renown with his participation in documenta IX in Kassel, Germany—the first Argentine artist invited to documenta—where he displayed an installation of twenty mattresses.

The cubistoid style that Kuitca developed and that would emerge as the artist’s distinct visual language first appeared in his ‘Desenlace’ series, which he presented at the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, these segmented forms and angular patterns acted as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series and have recurred throughout his oeuvre ever since.

Recent, major solo exhibitions of Kuitca’s work include the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Uruguay (2023); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2017); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2014); The Drawing Center NY (2012); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2010); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN (2010).

Kuitca’s work is represented in distinguished museums and collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago IL; Buffalo AKG Art Museum NY; Dallas Museum of Art TX; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut; Los Angeles County Museum of Art CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art NY; The Morgan Library & Museum NY; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TX; Museum of Modern Art NY; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, London.

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.

During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.

Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist‘s own performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature, and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.

McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973.  For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist-friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.

Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s.

Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much,’ 1986 and ‘Pickelporno,’ 1992, her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean,’ 1996 or ‘Worry Will Vanish,’ 2014.

For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest,’ 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape... The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’

Since 1984, Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions are 'Electric Idyll' at the Fire Station Doha (2024), 'Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon' at Hauser & Wirth New York and Luhring Augustine Chelsea (2023-24), 'Behind Your Eyelid' at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021 – 2022), ‘Your Eye Is My Island’ at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and ART TOWER MITO (2021). ‘Åbn min Lysning. Open my Glade’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk Denmark (2019), ‘Sip My Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2017 – 2018), ‘Pixel Forest’ at New Museum New York (2016 – 2017) and ‘Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain’ at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. A major exhibition is planned for summer 2025 at UCCA Beijing.

Anri Sala represents a truly contemporary international vision: working in a range of media including video, photography and installation, Sala was educated in Albania and France, but now lives and works in Berlin. In his films and installations, Sala invites viewers to participate in his world of cultural observation, for which he often uses socio-political settings and personal experiences as backdrops.

By juxtaposing elements of past and present, discordance and harmony, and by overlapping narrative, sound and movement, Sala creates a unique sensibility. With his first critically acclaimed experimental documentary ‘Intervista (Finding the words)’ from 1998, the artist formulates his interest in perception of reality, truth and historical transformation. Since then, his practice emerged into a study of sound—soundtracks of images, the absence of sound, or the failure of verbal communication, all form distinct kinds of narratives.

In 2001, Sala was the recipient of the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale and in 2013, he exhibited his acclaimed video works ‘Ravel Ravel’ and ‘Unravel’(both 2013) for the French Pavilion. Both works analyze the perception of space through music—two versions of Ravel’s ‘Piano Concerto for the Left hand in D-major’ can be seen performed alongside each other. ‘Unravel’ sets out to sync what deliberately was paced out of sync; Chloé, a DJ and music producer, can be observed standing in the middle of the German pavilion trying to untangle what has been entangled in ‘Ravel Ravel.'

The undercurrent of Sala’s projects, such as ‘Intervista (Finding Words)’ or ‘Ravel Ravel Unravel,’ is a fundamentally personal exploration of intimate, interwoven stories, resonating themes of a changing society and the individual. The artist’s interest in transition and rupture is demonstrated by the way in which he relates language, sound, music. The impact of his work featured at the world's top venues and exhibitions endorses Sala’s conviction that art can transcend cultural references without losing any of its specificity, nor indeed, its power.

Swiss artist Roman Signer has been redefining sculpture for more than 40 years and is now regarded as one of the finest representatives of Process and Conceptual art. He produces elementary dynamic sculptures and installations, also known as time sculptures for their preoccupation with the transformation of materials and objects through time. In his actions, acceleration and change are part of the creative process and he uses photography and moving image to document his work.Characterized by processes and potentialities, his work takes into account the concepts of Minimalism and Conceptualism, and with this Signer occupies a unique position in the recent history of sculpture. Signer exploits the possible uses and limitations of everyday objects, such as umbrellas, bottles, tables, chairs and candles, through a process guided by both curiosity and discipline. Like the director of a thriller, he makes use of tension and surprise—with the distinction that in his case everything takes place in the here and now. The works are the direct result of processes initiated by the artist.

Signer’s work explores the relationships between sudden energy releases and calm, between order and chaos, and the existence of form in the apparently formless. Physical forces like gravitation and motor energies are both a challenge to the artist and the instruments he relies on to realize his sculptural ideas. In his work, classical sculptural materials have been usurped by sand, water and ordinary objects. Meticulous planning and incalculable chance interact, generating ‘poetic’ visual installations with their own highly developed individual aesthetic. Signer’s artistic explorations of the world around us and its phenomena changes our perceptions and even seems to alter reality. Often the mere indication of a sudden or possible release of energy is enough to transmogrify a simple configuration of objects—a movable wooden arm and a rocket—into a wittily succinct visual commentary on the relationship between cause and effect.

His work has been presented in numerous museums and galleries worldwide and has been selected for prestigious international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, where he represented Switzerland in 1999, Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997) as well as Documenta 8 in Kassel where during ‘Action in front of the Orangerie’ he catapulted 350.000 sheets of paper into the air simultaneously with an explosive charge.