Upwardly mobiles: Hauser & Wirth makes grand entrance in Palo Alto with ‘Calder | O’Keeffe’

For a small town, Palo Alto has an impressive number of art galleries. There are five in the immediate downtown area, with the venerable Palo Alto Art Center, located just a mile away, bringing the count to six. The total was increased on Oct. 3 with the opening of the Hauser & Wirth Gallery, located in the renovated historic post office building on Hamilton Street.

The Swiss-based, international powerhouse gallery certainly knows how to make an entrance. The gallery opened with a block party that included food trucks, an ice cream vendor, as well as performances by Stanford Taiko and Cardinal Calypso and DJ sets that kept the atmosphere lively. The actual formal opening of the gallery doors was preceded by the call of traditional alpenhorns, played by folks in lederhosen and dirndls.  

A long line of interested art lovers formed around the block and waited in the hot sun to see the inaugural exhibition, “Calder | O’Keeffe.” It was a smart choice for the gallery’s first show – who doesn’t like the playful and airy mobiles and stabiles by Alexander Calder? And Georgia O’Keeffe is an American original, with her instantly recognizable renditions of the desert Southwest.

Combining the work of these master artists was inspired by a photograph, said Curatorial Senior Director Alexis Lowry. “I noticed a photograph of O’Keeffe’s bedroom in her Ghost Ranch, New Mexico home where there was a Calder mobile hung above her bed. In another picture, it had been moved to a living room in her Abiquiu home.” 

Lowry said she was struck by how the artist felt the need to include the Calder piece in her otherwise very stark decor and how his work seemed to be in “direct dialogue” with her own.

Although there is not much information about the Calder/O’Keeffe friendship, it is clear that they shared similar ideas about incorporating objects such as rocks or animal skulls found while walking in their immediate environs, a sort of moving meditation that informed their art. 

In the exhibition catalog’s essay, Lowry said that although the two artists were aligned with different movements (Calder with European traditions and O’Keeffe with American modernism), they supported each other when possible. O’Keeffe attended Calder’s 1943 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Calder created a special brooch for O’Keeffe using her initials. (A copy of it can be seen in a display case with other fabulous examples of Calder’s foray into jewelry-making).

Entering the gallery, the viewer is immediately treated to an untitled Calder mobile, gently swaying in the air currents and hanging at a very low level. Lowry said she was very intent on displaying the mobile at a height that would be more accessible, a feat accomplished after some negotiations with the Calder Foundation. The placement allows the visitor to move around the mobile and to see through it to the stunning O’Keeffe landscape directly behind it. “From a Day with Juan I” is boldly simple, with a large sand-colored rectangle in the center, offset by a sky-blue border. It instantly calls to mind a walk in the New Mexico desert.

Juxtapositions like this occur throughout the show, and the dialogue between the pieces is sometimes very striking. “Black Spot, No. 2” by O’Keeffe has dreamy, abstracted organic shapes in soft pastels that are bisected by a strong, diagonal black rectangle. Calder’s “Thin Black Stabile” echoes the upward projection, created in sheet metal and paint.

Lowry said she wanted to include art works by O’Keeffe that people were not as familiar with, so there are several paintings that veer away from the desert scenes and more toward abstraction, like “Waterfall I” and “Pink Abstraction.” For those of us who love her signature work, there is “Pelvis with the Moon – New Mexico” and “Dark Iris No. 2.”  

One wall is devoted to small-scale work by both artists and their shared inclinations are clear to see. O’Keeffe’s exuberant “Red Canna,” in which every petal of the glorious flower is rendered in detail, is countered by Calder’s “Untitled,” a stabile also painted red, with wire, string and wood that has an organic lightness. Similarly, the very rudimentary-looking “Little Yellow Panel” by Calder is as bright, fun and uplifting as O’Keeffe’s “Jonquils No. 2.”

In the catalog essay, Lowry explains the affinity between the two artists. “Both artists, in distinct yet unexpectedly aligned ways, engaged with abstraction as a means of translating and conveying the embodied experience of the built and natural world. O’Keeffe channeled the shifting skies and lithic hills of the Southwest into distilled, vibrating imagery, condensing landscape and organic form to essential structures charged with tactile sensation. Calder, by contrast, invited the forces of the world — air currents, gravity, motion — directly into the creative process.”

The exhibition fills the main room, a large space divided into three separate display areas by moveable walls. Architect Luis Laplace retained the high ceilings, making the area seem even larger and more open. Street-level windows allow for some natural lighting, and avoid the often closed-in feeling of many museum galleries. The 2,600 square feet of exhibition space includes a side gallery, off limits to the public, where VIP clients will be shown work by artists from the Hauser & Wirth roster.

The white walls and lack of signage encourage the viewer to focus solely on the art, but helpful desk staff are happy to provide an exhibition checklist. More information about Hauser & Wirth venues all over the world (there are a total of 18) can be found in the sleek Ursula Magazine, published quarterly by the gallery. Lucky visitors to the opening received one in a promotional swag bag.

Beatrice Shen, a native Palo Altan, has played a central role in bringing the gallery to the West Coast (there are two Hauser & Wirth galleries in Los Angeles) and will serve as director here. She shared future plans for the Palo Alto space.

“Like the Los Angeles galleries, we will have three exhibitions per year in the main space that will remain on view for around three months. We have found that this works well in the L.A. galleries and allows enough time for people to visit the exhibitions.”

In addition to the display spaces, the gallery encompasses an adjacent bookstore that was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves of art books, most of which are from the mega gallery’s publishing arm. The gallery also has plans to offer talks, events and “educational initiatives” that will complement the exhibitions and provide outreach into the community.

Although this debut exhibition had no labels or price tags, it is clear that Hauser & Wirth is a commercial sales gallery that represents blue-chip artists whose work can sell in the millions. This outpost is here because of wealthy high-tech collectors like Larry Ellison, Laurene Powell Jobs, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, and Marc and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (all of whom were cited by ArtNews Magazine in 2025 as important Bay Area collectors). There is also, no doubt, the hope that the emerging crop of AI investors will want to collect art. 

A gallery press release stated it this way: “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.”

 Time will tell, but in the meantime more aesthetic experiences, in the form of sophisticated exhibitions by internationally known artists, can only enhance the reputation of Palo Alto as a forward-thinking, culturally aware place to live and work.

“Calder | O’Keeffe” is on view through Jan. 24 at Hauser & Wirth, 201 Hamilton Ave., Palo Alto. hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/calder-okeeffe.

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