The small island known as Illa del Rei sits in the crystal-blue harbor of Menorca, in the middle of the Mediterranean. Remote, sun-baked, and sleepy, with sailboats anchored off its rocky shores, the outcrop embodies the allure of the Spanish Balearics. However, amid the lush greenery, there is one large stone building, a former hospital with a Spanish-tiled roof, that now, incongruously, features work by some of the world’s most acclaimed artists.
Since 2021, it has been a branch of the global art powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, one of its 21 worldwide locations. This summer, the gallery will show original pieces by the American Conceptualist Roni Horn, an acclaimed artist who has had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is known for her cast-glass sculptures.
The space is only open from spring to fall. While such a short timespan may seem counterintuitive to the highly competitive world of fine art’s year-round frenzy, Hauser & Wirth’s summer focus is part of a larger movement: Suddenly, a number of galleries have popped up in luxurious summer destinations to offer blue-chip, museum-worthy art—not the simple water scenes and landscapes once found in getaway locations.
The steady expansion of the contemporary art world into all corners of society, and the COVID-era shift to a work-from-home culture, has transformed life for vacationing collectors. Suddenly, you can purchase a button-pushing video artwork at the beach in France, a challenging painting by one of the biggest names in contemporary art at a mountain resort, or a serious Conceptual sculpture in a tiny whaling town.
Double Mobius, V. 2 (2009/2018) by Roni Horn. Photo by Marc Domage, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
The seasonal aspect of these galleries can be complex—some only operate in the summer, when they see a spike in visitors and sales—but location also brings a certain leeway. “By not being in a major city, I have freedom of experimentation,” says Lucy Chadwick, who opened the gallery Champ Lacombe in Biarritz, France, in 2021. “It’s a lighter way of working.”
The London native grew up spending summers in Biarritz, so she had a sense of what she was getting into with the city, located on the Bay of Biscay close to the Spanish border. It’s best known as a place where a James Bond type might show up and order a martini at one of the grand old casino hotels, and as a surfing destination. Chadwick says it was “an area previously without a contemporary art footprint.”
Operating her new gallery year-round, only five minutes from the beach, Chadwick set the tone for serious presentations with her first show at Champ Lacombe, a group presentation largely made up of videos, including “Lessons I-CLXXX” by Martine Syms, a Black artist who has tackled race and social justice in her work, and a piece by Adrian Piper, the somewhat reclusive philosopher and maker who had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018.
That Chadwick had previously worked in New York with the influential dealer Gavin Brown, giving her deep ties to artists and collectors, was a prerequisite for opening Champ Lacombe. While she doesn’t officially represent artists at this point, Chadwick will be exhibiting at the Frieze London art fair in October. “I don’t want to get too boxed in to one way of running a gallery,” she says of the way she is letting the concept evolve. “I want it to build itself.”
Chadwick says that it was ultimately the “COVID moment” that led to her bold experimentation, and the same is true for George Newall and Ingrid Lundgren, the founders of Winter Street Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard. Lundgren’s family has had a house there for years. In 2020, she and Newall decamped to the Vineyard during the pandemic’s initial shutdown period, but they were restless. They saw that a space was available in Edgartown, the island’s hub. A lightbulb went off, and a rental agreement was struck.
Both Lundgren and Newall were art world veterans; she was a colleague of Chadwick’s at Gavin Brown, and he worked at Sotheby’s auction house and David Nolan Gallery. The two came up with a desired slate for their first show. “We talked to all the artists,” Ludgren says, of a list that included Farah Al Qasimi, Brook Hsu, and Orion Martin, “and they all said yes.”
Though the Vineyard is a summer home to a number of rather iconic creative types, ranging from Spike Lee to Carly Simon, the duo was proposing something new. “We realized there was a huge gap on the island,” says Lundgren. “Arts has a big place there, but there was no precedent for a contemporary art gallery in the way we understand it.” That first show in 2020, titled A group of more or less than 10, featured a mix of artists, including Anna Weyant, the 29-year-old painter who has gained fame for her paintings of women. Later, Winter Street put on solo shows, a thematic sea-oriented show, and two-person exhibitions such as Sarah Charlesworth & Luke O’Halloran.
That duo is an example of one of the gallery’s abiding interests: “Putting an older generation of artists in conversation with a younger generation,” says Lundgren. Charlesworth, who died in 2013 at the age of 66, was an influential photographer, and O’Halloran is a young, Brooklyn-based painter.
Untitled (2019) by Victoria Gitman. Courtesy of the artist and Winter Street Gallery.
Being a rarity has benefits. “[Winter Street is] the only thing of its kind in town,” says Newall, “and anyone here who is remotely interested in contemporary art, there’s a decent chance they’ll find their way to the gallery.” He adds, “Visitors tend to spend longer in the gallery than they would in New York. It’s not one of five shows you’ll see that afternoon—it’s the only show you’ll see that weekend, probably.” Housed in a white shingled building fronted by blue hydrangeas, Winter Street is open from May to October, and this year it will mount five shows, including a solo presentation of the painter Louis Eisner from July 12 to August 11.
That gallery and other similar spaces can exist because of an art world duality. On one hand, many collectors routinely buy works based on a PDF or prior knowledge of an artist’s work (say, from seeing it at an art fair), meaning that there is a steady stream of transactions happening online, no matter the month, for plugged-in people like Lundgren and Newall. That helps even out seasonality. At the same time, physical exhibitions of art matter, not only to collectors, who want to truly experience what they might buy, but to the artists and the dealers.
“Having a physical space impacts the in-person audience engagement and the types of projects we can do,” says Newall. “It’s also about the relationships we can have with our collaborators. It stokes the imagination of artists in a different way.” It’s no small thing that artists also like to come to the Vineyard in summer to spend time there installing their Winter Street shows.
That theory is shared by Eric Firestone, who opened a gallery in East Hampton 14 years ago. He lives there (though he now has a New York City gallery too), and thinks that makes a difference. “I keep my doors open year-round, because you have to connect with the community,” he says.
But he also adjusts to fit the time of year. “I learned very quickly that if you try to do big shows year-round, you’ll go out of business very quickly,” he says, given that things are slow in February. And, he adds, “That’s not how the art world works now,” referring to the constant stream of commerce that is flowing regardless of what’s on gallery walls.
Installation view of the exhibition opening day lineup. Photo courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery.
Like many dealers in summer places, Firestone feels that his location frees him up a little, as audiences are more willing to be surprised. He has organized a show called Pass the Mic, in which artists each choose works by someone else to exhibit, and thematic group shows pop up frequently, like last year’s (Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract and Beauty of Summer. He’s creative with locations, too: He has held a winter pop-up at Sarah Gavlak’s esteemed Palm Beach gallery, and now Gavlak will reciprocate with her own pop-up in Firestone’s separate warehouse space this summer.
The pandemic affected the context of Firestone’s gallery dramatically, but temporarily. A handful of big New York City galleries opened branches in the Hamptons in 2020 and 2021, since many of the owners were living locally during the lockdown (Pace Gallery, Per Skarstedt, and Michael Werner Gallery among them); but now, most have closed, returning the landscape to one that looks a lot closer to that of 2019.
One relatively recent opening did survive. The dealer and advisor Max Levai has since 2021 put on selling exhibitions at The Ranch in Montauk, at the far Eastern tip of Long Island. This summer, a show of Ellsworth Kelly and Peter Cain runs from July 20 to August 20, and an exhibition of Sayre Gomez and Jack Goldstein runs from August 24 to October 5.
Given the global reach of some of the biggest art galleries and their many locations, perhaps it was inevitable that some of them would open branches in a summer getaway. Sometimes these are ephemeral: Every summer, Gagosian hosts a one-night, invitation-only exhibition at Casa Malaparte, the famous cliffside house designed by Curzio Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri; in the past, it has featured artists like Ed Ruscha, Jonas Wood, Brice Marden, Jenny Saville, and Rudolf Stingel.
With his Menorca outlet, Iwan Wirth, Hauser & Wirth’s co-founder, was looking to lay down roots, even though the location is unusual. “We weren’t like, Let’s find somewhere hard to get on an island,” he says. “These places find you, you don’t find them. Menorca is magical.”
Wirth’s passion for the island started with the getaway home of his mother-in-law and gallery co-founder, Ursula Hauser, on nearby Mallorca. Excursions to Menorca over the years led to Wirth and family buying a farmhouse on the sea as well as opening the gallery.
Óxido G-78 (Oxide G-78) (1985) by Eduardo Chillida. Photo by Stefan Alternburger Photography Zurich, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
“One of our principles at the gallery is giving everyone access to contemporary art, and we’ve had over two hundred thousand visitors,” says Wirth, who balances that democratic impulse with an elite appeal. “It’s also a sailing destination for private yachts. A lot of our clients visit during the summer on their boat.”
They inaugurated the Hauser & Wirth space with a show of the acclaimed American painter Mark Bradford, who lived in the gallery’s on-island residency during his show, and it was a hit with the locals—not that such popularity affects the bottom line for a multi-national organization that represents some of the biggest artists in the world. “We don’t run shops,” is how Wirth puts it. “No one walks into the New York galleries and asks for a price list. The programming finds commercial success regardless.” Many clients commit to a work before a Menorca show even opens, and then “come to visit their piece during the summer,” Wirth adds.
Another influential dealer with galleries around the world, Thaddeus Ropac, took the opposite trajectory: Forty years ago, he started his business in a summer place, the picturesque Austrian mountain town of Salzburg, and expanded from there. It is best known as the home of the Salzburg Festival, this year running from July 19 to August 31, featuring a wide lineup of opera, music, and drama performances, all framed by the nearby peaks of the Alps. Salzburg is the hometown of Mozart himself, not to mention that its Baroque architecture was immortalized in the Sound of Music.
Villa Kast in Salzburg. Photo by Ulrich Ghezzi, courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
“When I began, I didn’t understand the impact the music festival would have,” says Ropac, who hails from southern Austria and, later on, opened additional locations in Paris, London, and Seoul. It quickly became clear that music lovers were a great audience for his artists. “Opera is so high-end, and people are coming through and renting houses and going to performances,” he says. “And during the daytime, they want to see art.”
His gallery is located in a 19th-century mansion, Villa Kast, that backs onto the lush Mirabell Garden. From July 26 to September 28, Ropac will open a show of new works by the acclaimed German painter Anselm Kiefer, a gallery artist and close confidant of the dealer since the mid-’90s, and there is a concurrent show of work by Joseph Beuys and John Cage.
The “relaxed and elegant atmosphere” of this summer hub primes his international visitors to appreciate art, says Ropac, echoing a theme of every dealer who chooses to capitalize on a summer place location. “You hear so many languages in the gallery,” he adds. “It shows the special spirit of Salzburg. You can really feel the creative energy.”
Read more from the latest issue of PALMER On the Road, available now.