Hauser & Wirth Opens Palo Alto Gallery With Calder-O’Keeffe Show

Hauser & Wirth is planting another flag in California, announcing that it will open a new gallery in downtown Palo Alto on October 3, marking the mega-gallery’s first permanent location in Silicon Valley. The space will debut with “Calder | O’Keeffe,” which is dedicated to the friendship and artistic relationship between Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe. 

The opening adds another pin to what is already one of the world’s largest commercial gallery networks. Founded in Zurich in 1992, Hauser & Wirth now operates 16 locations across the US, Europe, and Asia, including galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Zurich, Basel, Monaco and Menorca. Palo Alto will become the gallery’s sixth US location and second in California. The Palo Alto outpost will be led by senior director Beatrice Shen, who previously helped oversee Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles gallery and its participation in San Francisco’s FOG Design+Art fair.

The move also brings Hauser & Wirth closer Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of Emerson Collective who lives in Palo Alto and has long been rumored to be one the gallery’s marquee clients. The city was previously home to an outpost of Pace Gallery, which closed in 2022. 

The space’s inaugural exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Calder Foundation and with research support from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, will pair works by both artists with archival material tracing their decades-long friendship.

Although Calder and O’Keeffe worked in very different mediums, they maintained a friendship that stretched over decades. Calder designed a brass brooch bearing O’Keeffe’s initials for her in the late 1930s, while O’Keeffe later installed one of his black mobiles in her New Mexico home, where it became a fixture in photographs of the artist. According to Hauser & Wirth, O’Keeffe once remarked that she recognized her own “pelvis bone holes” in Calder’s abstract forms, an observation that helped inspire the exhibition’s exploration of the unexpected parallels between two of America’s most celebrated modernists. 

Located in a restored century-old post office building at 201–225 Hamilton Avenue, the 2,600-square-foot gallery will include a Hauser & Wirth Bookshop designed as a community gathering space for talks, educational programs, and publishing events. Architect Luis Laplace is overseeing the renovation, continuing the gallery’s practice of adapting historic buildings for contemporary use.