Conversations with Ursula Hauser, Art Collector
Hauser & Wirth Publishers is pleased to present a new book charting the story of the Ursula Hauser Collection, titled The Inner Mirror: Conversations with Ursula Hauser, Art Collector. Over the course of four decades Ursula Hauser has quietly built one of the world’s most impressive private collections of modern and contemporary art—acquiring works from visionary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Carol Rama, Alina Szapocnikow, Franz West, among many others—and in 1992, she co-founded, together with her son-in-law Iwan Wirth and her daughter Manuela, the gallery Hauser & Wirth. Published in both English and German on the occasion of the exhibition Unconscious Landscape. Works from the Ursula Hauser Collection at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the book features a series of interviews with Ursula Hauser, providing the first-ever extensive and intimate account of her life and deeply personal collection of works.
Edited by Laura Bechter, Curator of the Ursula Hauser Collection, and Michaela Unterdörfer, Director of Hauser & Wirth Publishers, The Inner Mirror sheds light on the origins and trajectory of Ursula Hauser’s passion for collecting. In a series of conversations conducted over a period of several months, Ursula Hauser, Laura Bechter, and Michaela Unterdörfer discuss the work of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Heidi Bucher, Roni Horn, Eva Hesse, Richard Jackson, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano, Meret Oppenheim, Carol Rama, Sylvia Sleigh, Alina Szapocznikow, and Franz West, among many others.
Michaela Unterdörfer comments, “Not only is the Ursula Hauser Collection itself unique, it also holds a unique position in the field of contemporary art collecting, testifying, as it does, to Hauser’s explicit interest in the experiences and reflections of female sensitivity that are distilled and expressed in art. This has led, over the years, to a collection that particularly accentuates women’s art. Time and again, our conversation returned to the fact that women artists are underrepresented and have fewer opportunities to take advantage of their artistic potential.”
A collector who lives with her art—she often has works installed in her proximity immediately upon acquiring them—Ursula Hauser engages in an active exchange with those who have created it, and many close friendships with artists have grown over the years. These relationships, chronicled throughout the publication, exemplify Ursula Hauser’s desire to become acquainted with the people behind the art, to find out more about their lives and thoughts, and to investigate the untold ways in which the human condition may acquire concrete shape in the form and material of an artwork.
Ursula Hauser’s dynamic engagement with artists and acquisitions of their work has helped make her collection a unique resource for scholars and arts professionals. The Inner Mirror continues on Hauser & Wirth’s recent series of publications, projects, and presentations focused on important private collections that include the Onnasch Collection, the Panza Collection, and the Sylvio Perlstein Collection, exploring questions such as: How does a private collection of art acquire shape? How does it express the personality of the collector? What factors determine a collector’s view of art? And what responsibility do collectors take for what they have collected?
About Hauser & Wirth Publishers
Artists’ voices, exceptional art, scholarship, design, and bookmaking are at the heart of Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ program. Publications have always played a vital role at Hauser & Wirth as resources for and lasting records of the gallery’s exhibitions and artists’ work. Hauser & Wirth Publishers has grown to become a leading imprint for unique, object-like books that encourage an understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art. With the special access granted by artists to their writings and archives, Hauser & Wirth Publishers offers a program of more than twenty-five titles per year and also publishes the quarterly art magazine, Ursula. Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ backlist comprises monographs, artists’ books, and exhibition catalogs—often bringing new and overlooked aspects of an artist’s creative practice into focus.
Titles from the Hauser and Wirth Publishers program can be found at each of Hauser & Wirth’s gallery locations. Opening in June 2019, Hauser and Wirth Publishers’ new headquarters in Zurich will feature a publisher’s bookshop that joins its counterparts in New York and London – shops that also serve as local hubs for communities and artists, where the gallery presents a range of public programming.
