In the very tight club of galleries with a global influence, Hauser

From 1955 to 2018, the mansion was the historic headquarters of Europe 1, which has since migrated to the 15th arrondissement. Hauser

Timeless artists and stars of the moment

Manuela Hauser and Iwan Wirth attract major collectors with their apparent simplicity. Manuela, daughter of billionaire Ursula Hauser – one of the greatest Swiss collectors, who made her fortune in the trade – rarely lets go of her knitting. Neither she nor her husband talk about money. Their turnover, which we imagine to be stratospheric, is a well-kept secret. Their catalog includes as many timeless artists as stars of the moment: Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Taeuber-Arp rub shoulders with the Americans Rashid Johnson and Mark Bradford or the Frenchman Pierre Huyghe.

In thirty years, with the support of Ursula Hauser, the couple created an empire which now shines in London, New York, Los Angeles, where they have created a gigacomplex in the city center, as well as in Monaco, where they settled near the Hôtel de Paris, a familiar haunt of the ultra-rich passing through the Rock.

But that’s not all. The ambitious couple has also spread to Somerset, England, to Balmoral, on Scottish royal lands, and to Menorca, in the Balearic Islands: three bucolic sites where they have created ultra-chic estates combining nature, gastronomy and business. It has been almost fifteen years since Hauser

The fantasy of the mansion

A place had been found by the Argentinian Luis Laplace, the interior designer who has been developing their various sites since 2013: rue du Cirque, almost opposite the Bristol. “We were taken with the opening of our spaces in Somerset and Los Angeles,” says Iwan Wirth. To open a third place at the same time was to risk ruining everything. The idea is maturing, however. In ten years, the couple of gallerists visited nearly a hundred spaces from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, so popular with tourists, to the Marais, ultimately deemed “too difficult to access”. “We wanted a mansion, says Marc Payot. It is the absolute fantasy of foreign galleries and artists. »

“The alignment of the planets”, as Iwan Wirth puts it, owes much to the geopolitics of contemporary art. Paris is back at a time when Brexit has weakened London, Europe’s leading art market and third globally, according to the Art Basel-UBS Global Art Market report published in March. France only ranks fourth in the world (behind the United States, China and Great Britain), but it wants to be a land of welcome for artists in the firmament. David Hockney thus settled there in the midst of a pandemic, the South Korean Lee Ufan opened his foundation in Arles in May.

A fundamental trend

The acceleration is so rapid that it is impossible to determine what triggered it. The prospect of the Cartier Foundation moving opposite the Louvre in 2024? The opening of the Bourse de Commerce in 2021? The birth of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, seven years earlier? The activism of François Pinault and Bernard Arnault ended up attracting merchants.

By announcing its arrival, in October, in Paris, the powerful Art Basel fair establishes a phenomenon and promises to amplify it. For the very wealthy Hauser customers

The opening in March of the Dior gallery, also on rue François-Ier, also symbolized Paris’s reconquest of its own brands that success had made “international”. When Ivan Wirth declares that “Paris is the European epicenter of contemporary art, which competes with or even surpasses London”, he is not only making a statement, but announcing that, by his presence, he will reinforce the trend.