Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
visitor to the enormous new art gallery occupying a complex of seven buildings in Downtown Los Angeles' Arts District might be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled into a new annex of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The space's inaugural show, a survey of abstract sculpture by 34 female artists from 1947 to the present, is museum-quality in its breadth and depth, starting with Louise Bourgeois' Personages and Ruth Asawa's woven-wire pieces and continuing up to works by such contemporary artists as Kaari Upson and Shinique Smith. Most pieces are not for sale. Located in a former flour mill with 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, the gallery is as big as MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space, just six blocks away. And there's a familiar name behind the show: Paul Schimmel, the former chief curator of MOCA. But while it may have some of the hallmarks of a museum, the gallery is Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, the sixth outpost of Zurich-based Hauser & Wirth. "This was not something I expected when I left MOCA," says Schimmel. "I thought that it was most likely that I would be working at another museum in another city," he says, sitting in a temporary gallery office in Downtown L.A. a few weeks before the March 13 opening. Schimmel—whose acclaimed exhibitions included "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s," "Ecstasy," "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" and "Under the Big Black Sun"—speaks quietly and calmly. But the excitement he has about the new gallery comes through loud and clear. Already that day, he's completed a six-hour meeting with the contractor about finishing construction. It's the first time in his nearly 40-year career he's gotten to help oversee the creation of an entirely new enterprise from the ground up, working in conjunction with architect Annabelle Selldorf and real estate company Creative Space, Los Angeles. He lays out some of the final galleys of the book for the exhibit—co-curated by Jenni Sorkin, art historian and professor at University of California, Santa Barbara—which have just gone off to the printer. He gets up to show off the maquettes that have just been finished of the four buildings where the exhibit, "Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016," will unfold, running through September 4. Inside are tiny representations of each of the nearly 100 included works. In one room, he's been toying with switching a Louise Nevelson here for a Lee Bontecou there and tweaking the order of works elsewhere. "Seeing how these works relate to each other, how these artists are in dialogue with each other is enormously gratifying," he says. Some of the themes are how many of the artists work or worked with materials in non-hierarchical ways, used ephemeral materials and made pieces themselves in studio. "All of these artists created a kind of counterpoint to the more cast and fabricated monumental sculptures that have become more predominant within sculpture," he says. Schimmel relates that after his tenure at MOCA, he got an enquiring call from Iwan and Manuela Wirth of Hauser & Wirth (which represents such West Coast artists as Mark Bradford and Paul McCarthy) about joining the gallery. He says he was won over by their idea of creating a hybrid of the commercial and the non-commercial, in line with a move toward mounting institutional-quality shows in the gallery world at such places as Pace Gallery and Gagosian. "They had a vision of creating a program that is museum-like and puts a strong emphasis on both scholarship and education," he says. The majority of the works in the new show are loans from major museums, private collections and artists' estates. Only a select few of the pieces are for sale, some newly created for the exhibit. The search for the right space in L.A. took Schimmel to more than 15 locations around the city. The former Globe Mills flour mill, which once employed 900 workers, stood out for its size and scale as well as its history. Beginning in 1896, it was built over the course of 40 years and is decorated in places with symbols of a globe with wheat as an architectural detail. It includes a neo- classical bank building, large warehouse spaces and a 12,000-square-foot courtyard where Jackie Winsor is re-creating her rope sculpture 30 to 1 Bound Trees. It had been largely untouched in recent decades. "It's very exciting to see the finishing touches get wrapped up and floors that have been dirty for 25 years get swept and witness this place that has existed in anonymity for so many years take on a new life," says Brian Boyer, the director of operations whose prior stints have been at MOCA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art. Adds Graham Steele, the gallery's senior director of sales, who was previously at White Cube Hong Kong, "There's so much space within the building. It gives us an amount of flexibility that's almost endless. In theory we could have seven different shows on at one time if we were incredibly masochistic." Beyond the exhibit spaces, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel also includes a bookstore, a 140-seat restaurant and bar and a space for education and public programming. "The whole idea is that there's a flow to the gallery; it's not as though everything is self-contained," says senior director Stacen Berg, who joined the L.A. team after working at the Hammer Museum and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. But while the ambitions may be big, what is likely to hold true for the new gallery is a commitment to artists. "One of the things I've been most committed to from the beginning of my career is a very direct and very personal engagement with artists, and MOCA's reputation as 'the artists' museum' is something I helped develop," says Schimmel, whose 22-year career has made him a champion of California artists. "I realized that this is my city, these are my artists and I very much want to be a part of this great community going forward." 188 CULTURED "In theory, we could have seven different shows on at one time if we were incredibly masochistic." —Graham Steele A