Los Angeles Artist rafa esparza Joins Hauser & Wirth, With a New York Show Planned for 2027
Los Angeles artist rafa esparza has a new gallery partner. The international gallery group Hauser & Wirth now handles his work, ArtNews reported.
The move is made in collaboration with Commonwealth and Council, the Los Angeles gallery that has long shown esparza's work. Hauser & Wirth is not taking over alone. The two galleries will work together on his career.
esparza's main material is adobe, a building block made from loam (a soil rich in clay and sand), straw, manure and water. He has worked with it since 2014. He learned the technique from his father, whose family has used adobe for generations in Durango, Mexico.
His adobe work has already been seen in major exhibitions. He showed pieces at the Made in L.A. biennial in Los Angeles in 2016, and at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2017. A biennial is a large art exhibition held every two years.
Hauser & Wirth plans several new steps for him. esparza will have his first solo show with the gallery in fall 2027, in one of its New York spaces. A solo show features one artist alone. Before that, he will debut a new work at the gallery's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, the Florida art fair that runs each December. A booth is the stand a gallery rents inside a fair.
Readers who follow art books will also see a first. Zolo Press will publish rafa esparza: Works on Adobe, his first monograph. A monograph is a book devoted to the work of a single artist.
Hauser & Wirth also works with the artists Firelei Baez and Angel Otero, according to the same report.
For a general reader, the story is simple. An artist known for building with earth is moving into a larger gallery network, with a book and a New York exhibition lined up. Gallery partnerships like this one decide where an artist's work is shown, who sees it, and how it is priced and sold. The first concrete date is the 2027 show.
