LOS ANGELES, CA…On March 13th, ARTBOOK will open a new arts and culture bookstore in the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Known for its distinctive popup stores at art fairs, and its museum bookstores at MoMA PS1 and the Walker Art Center, ARTBOOK was invited by Hauser & Wirth to create a destination bookstore within the gallery’s new Los Angeles location—Hauser Wirth & Schimmel—in a converted historic flour mill complex.
ARTBOOK @ Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is located at 917 East 3rd Street.
Bringing an experimental dynamic to book selling, ARTBOOK will devote a large portion of its retail space to spotlight selections that change every several months, focusing in great depth upon different movements and themes in contemporary and 20th century art. Complementing current exhibitions as well as new developments in art practices and writing, these rotating thematic displays will include new releases in addition to important backlist books, indie press titles, imported catalogs, and out of print selections.
ARTBOOK opens in March with its first thematic spotlight devoted to books about women artists, with titles chosen to contextualize the inaugural Hauser Wirth & Schimmel exhibition Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016, co-curated by Paul Schimmel, former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and current Partner and Vice President at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, and Jenni Sorkin, art historian, critic, and Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This special book selection brings dimension to the monolithic category of “women artists” by featuring practitioners working in a wide variety of styles, media, and genres spanning generations, races and nationalities, and religious and sexual identities.
“It’s been nearly ten years since MoCA’s seminal 2007 exhibition WACK!, and over the last decade we’ve finally seen a critical mass of serious publishing on women artists,” says Skúta Helgason, ARTBOOK’s Creative Director. “When that show traveled to MoMA PS1, it was difficult to find books on most of the artists featured. This is truly the first moment in history when a bookstore can stock a wall of shelves solely with women artists. I want to celebrate these books and encourage our visitors to discover them.”
ARTBOOK’s thematic focus will also guide its signings and events calendar, developed in tandem with Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. The bookstore will also carry Hauser & Wirth’s own extensive list of books, as well as monographs and related publications supporting the gallery’s international programming.
As part of the burgeoning Arts District in Los Angeles, and with the pedestrian friendly gallery complex connecting East 2nd and East 3rd Streets via a dramatic public breezeway, ARTBOOK will be actively engaged with the neighborhood. “Every bookstore has its own unique personality and strengths,” says Skúta. “Our goal is definitely not to stock every title. We’ll certainly be referring customers to the excellent bookstores and museum shops of Los Angeles, whose inventory complements our admittedly idiosyncratic and rapidly evolving selection.” He added that ARTBOOK @ Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will appeal to those who are interested in international arts and culture, “but we’re also featuring an uptodate collection of titles on visual studies and critical theory, a selection of contemporary literature, the newest international magazines on art and culture, displays of postcards and stationery items, and a kidfriendly area for children’s books.”
“We are honored to welcome ARTBOOK to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel,” says Paul Schimmel, Partner and Vice President. “Books, publications, and scholarship have been essential to Hauser & Wirth’s activities since it was founded in 1992, and they will be central to the gallery’s program in Los Angeles. We look forward to collaborating with ARTBOOK in the months ahead.”
About ARTBOOK LLC
Founded in 2004, ARTBOOK partners with cultural organizations seeking to enrich their programming with the editorial content that a focused selection of wellconceived, authored, and designed books makes possible. ARTBOOK runs bookstores at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, and the Swiss Institute, in addition to numerous popup stores at art and photography fairs. On the web, artbook.com hosts ecommerce partnerships with museums and cultural institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Creative Capital. ARTBOOK LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
About Skúta Helgason
Skúta, an Icelander, ran his first concept bookstore, devoted to artists’ books, in Washington D.C. in the 1980s at Washington Project for the Arts. After, he spent seven years working as an artist and publisher in Berlin. He then moved to New York in the 1990s, continuing his own art practice. In 2004, he opened ARTBOOK @ MoMA PS1, which evolved over the following years from a small kiosk to a deeply stocked contemporary art bookstore with a separate international magazine store. Skúta also oversees ARTBOOK’s presence at art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze New York, and the Los Angeles Art Book Fair as well as ARTBOOK popup stores. The mobile fixtures for the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel space are specially designed by Skúta himself to meet the changing needs of the store’s inventory.
About Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
Open to the public from 13 March 2016, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is a new destination at 901 East 3rd Street, in the heart of the burgeoning Downtown Arts District of Los Angeles. The gallery occupies the restored Globe Mills complex, an abandoned group of interconnected late 19th and early 20thcentury buildings and outdoor spaces that have been adapted by Creative Space, Los Angeles, in consultation with Annabelle Selldorf, Selldorf Architects. Here visitors will discover innovative exhibitions devoted to modern masterworks and important contemporary art, as well as public programs and educational activities that contextualize the art on view for diverse audiences.
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will complement its exhibition program with the ARTBOOK store, a publications lab, a bar and restaurant featuring seasonal fare and locallysourced produce, a garden, commissioned permanent works of art that engage the architecture of the place, and outdoor areas for quiet contemplation and informal gathering.
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is the sixth location of Hauser & Wirth, an international gallery devoted to contemporary and modern art, founded in Switzerland in 1992 by Iwan and Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser. Today it is a global enterprise with spaces in Zürich, London, New York, Somerset, and Los Angeles. The gallery’s global operations are overseen by Iwan and Manuela Wirth; Marc Payot, Partner and Vice President; and Paul Schimmel, Partner and Vice President.
For the uptodate ARTBOOK @ Hauser Wirth & Schimmel event schedule, please visit artbook.com.
