Critiquing Modernism & Capitalism, One Hauser & Wirth Show At A Time

Does Hauser & Wirth have a conventional commercial relationship with David Hammons? As Zhou Enlai said when Henry Kissinger asked him about the impact of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to say.”

the zurich branch of hauser and wirth gallery is a white painted warehouse with rectangular columns, tiled in white, a shallow arched brick window and several concrete beams on the ceiling. the 2003 exhibition of david hammons sculptures, which are comprised of wooden shipping pallets stacked with brown cardboard boxes, each screenprinted in red on the sides: made in the people's republic of harlem. the stacks are arranged haphazardly in the space, not systematically. no stack is much larger than a big american refrigerator.
Installation view, David Hammons, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, 2003 via hauserwirth

In a just-published oral history Marc Payot, a president at Hauser & Wirth, remembers the early days:

In the early 2000s, Iwan [Wirth, co-founder and president, Hauser & Wirth] and I started having discussions with David that began with the help of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn [founder, Salon 94], who was working very actively with him, and Lois Plehn, who serves as David’s agent. Quite soon, he decided to do a show with us in Zurich, an installation of cardboard boxes filled with scavenged clothes and stacked on wooden pallets called Made in the Republic of Harlem. There were labels printed on the boxes that said, “Made in the Republic of Harlem,” giving them a Warhol-like feel, which was interesting. In an adjoining gallery he showed Hidden from View, wooden museum pedestals topped with plexiglass cubes. Cubes like this would normally contain objects, but David left them empty. The feet of small African-like sculptures could be seen peeking out from beneath the pedestals, all but concealed. The sculptures were amazing—David’s way of making something seemingly unremarkable look iconic.

in a white walled gallery space at hauser and wirth in zurich in 2003, david hammons exhibited untitled works with the parenthetical title, hidden from view. they are plywood vitrines with empty acrylic boxes set on top, and african carved wood figures underneath, with just their feet revealed under the open legs of the vitrine. five such sculptures are in this image
David Hammons, Untitled (Hidden from View), 2002, installation view, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, 2003 via hauserwirth

In her 2005 essay, “An Elective Affinity,” curator Claire Tancons examined the Zürich show in the context of Hammons’ preceding emptying of the exhibition space, Concerto in Black and Blue, a Black Cube critique of the White Cube. Tancons’s overarching analysis is of Hammons’ and other artists’ critique of the treatment of African art and culture by both the Modern and Postmodern movements of western art. From André Breton to MoMA’s William Rubin, “primitive” and “tribal” African artifacts are not just appropriated, but valorized and elevated to the status of Art, turning it into a readymade.

She quotes Sally Price: “[Western connoisseurs] essentially see themselves as doing for African sculpture (for example) what Andy Warhol did for Brillo boxes or, more strictly speaking, Marcel Duchamp for urinals.”

The actual text on Hammons’ “Warhol-like” boxes filled, purportedly, with used clothing purchased, not scavenged, reads “Made in the People’s Republic of Harlem.” Unlike Warhol’s boxes, they sit on integral pedestals, a la Brancusi, collapsing the twin threads of Modernism—Primitivism and the Readymade—into one. Hammons asserts a Black sovereign, anti-capitalist presence while critiquing white colonialism across the entirety of institutional art history, or as it’s known in the gallery business, “making something seemingly unremarkable look iconic.”

a david hammons sculpture comprised of a square plywood pedstal twelve inches on a side, raised on dowel legs, with an empty plexiglass vitrine nested on top, and a traditionally carved african figure underneath the pedestal, so that just its lower legs are sticking out. untitled hidden from view was made in 2002, sold in 2015, and brought to auction at sotheby's in 2025, where it failed to sell
David Hammons, Untitled (Hidden from View), 2002, plexiglas vitrine, wood pedestal, found [sic] sculpture, 61 x 12 x 12 in., unsold at Sotheby’s 16 May 2025

Hauser & Wirth held onto at least one Untitled (Hidden from View) vitrine work for twelve years, until 2015, when they placed it in “a prestigious American collection.” There it stayed for nearly ten years—and counting? It turned up at Sotheby’s last week, but didn’t sell.

In her final note in “An Elective Affinity,” Tancons writes:

I have made no distinction between the museum and the gallery, seeing the latter as the commercial counterpart of the former; both share the same modernist tactics of display. However, I do believe that Hammons’s choice of a gallery setting for some of his works is not the result of chance, and that the influence of commercial galleries on contemporary artistic practice could be analyzed in the same way that Kynaston McShine analyzed the influence of the museum on the artistic practices of the twentieth century.

So yes, this is all a conventional commercial relationship. It is inextricably linked to museums. And not only does even the most candid and privileged account of the most involved people leave out crucial aspects of an artwork’s importance, it does so by design.

Claire Tancons’s essay is in Kellie Jones’ 2025 reader, David Hammons [mit]
the H&W David Hammons Oral History is in Ursula Issue 12 [hauserwirth]