The art market may be on shaky ground, but no one told the megas. Hauser & Wirth, which currently has 17 locations worldwide, has just revealed plans to open a new gallery in Palo Alto, California, in spring 2026.
The Palo Alto space will be the gallery’s third location in California, joining its Downtown Los Angeles complex—which includes the farm-to-table restaurant Manuela—and its West Hollywood outpost, which opened in 2016 and 2023, respectively.
“Northern California occupies an equally powerful position [as Los Angeles] as home to a fantastically dedicated community of collectors and the museums they have built,” gallery president Marc Payot said in a statement. “Perched in its prime spot on the edge of the Pacific Rim and populated by generations of astute and ambitious patrons of the arts, the Bay Area is a place where we are proud to be creating a new space, an energy center for our artists and the community.”
The new 2,600-square-foot gallery—Hauser & Wirth’s first in the Bay Area—will occupy a former post office at 201–225 Hamilton Avenue, a short walk from the Stanford University campus. Architect Luis Laplace, principal of Laplace, will lead the renovation.
Hauser & Wirth is the first mega-gallery to take a bet on the Bay Area since Pace Gallery closed its outpost there in 2022—a somewhat surprising development given that the region routinely ranks among the wealthiest metro areas in the United States. Gagosian operated a location in San Francisco, near SFMOMA, for around four years until December 2020.
According to Henley & Partners’s U.S. Wealth Report 2024, the Bay Area has a comparable number of millionaires and centimillionaires—and slightly more billionaires—than New York City.
The region is home to many ARTnews Top 200 collectors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and Laura Arillaga-Andreesen, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former Gap Inc. chairman Robert Fisher, and tech power couple Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, among others.
On Tuesday evening, Shah told ARTnews that the new gallery “makes a lot of sense” for Hauser & Wirth.
“Part of the Bay Area culture is to not talk about possessions or collecting, but there is an active community,” Shah said, noting Hauser’s ties to regional collectors, its connections to nearby Stanford, and a growing population of young collectors who she said need to be cultivated and engaged.
“I’m confident that Hauser will do it right—with a host of programming, books, and activations alongside the art,” she added. “They know how to go into a place and energize it.”
The last wave of mega-gallery expansion in the Bay Area came in the mid-2010s, when Pace and Gagosian opened locations in Palo Alto (2014) and San Francisco (2016), respectively. At the time, the moves were seen as a sign of a maturing local scene and a strategic play to court the region’s growing class of tech collectors.
Pace’s initial Palo Alto gallery—a former Tesla showroom—was framed by president Marc Glimcher as a pop-up. It was rented from John Arrillaga, the late Silicon Valley real estate developer and father of Arrillaga-Andreessen. In 2018, the gallery relocated to a smaller, more permanent space in a converted movie theater nearby, but in August 2022, it announced plans to shutter the outpost, citing a consolidation of its West Coast operations.
A month earlier, Artnet News had reported that Powell Jobs—long affiliated with Pace—had shifted her support to Hauser & Wirth. Around this time, she also began to separate from Superblue, the immersive art venture cofunded by Powell Jobs and Pace.
As for whether Hauser might face the same challenges that Pace did, Shah said she sees the Swiss gallery moving in a “more deliberate and intentional” way, with a diverse program that will “meet its match” in the Bay Area’s “very” international community.
“If this is done right—and I believe it will—it would be a huge win for everybody,” Shah said, citing collectors’ strong support for local institutions such as Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and the Anderson Collection. “This seems like the right time and the right thing to do.”
