Hauser & Wirth Menorca is an art centre combining art, education and conservation in the natural setting of Illa del Rei, an island in Mahon harbour. The art centre presents an exhibition programme spanning ambitious new commissions by gallery artists across all media. Following a conservation project, Hauser & Wirth sensitively repurposed the existing 18th-century outbuildings of a naval hospital to create the 1,500 sq.m art centre, which has welcomed over 127,000 visitors since it opened in 2021.
Hauser & Wirth Menorca comprises an exhibition space comprises eight galleries and an outdoor sculpture trail, embedding works by artists including Martin Creed, Stefan Brüggemann, Hans Josephson, Paul McCarthy, Thomas J Price, Pipilotti Rist, Eduardo Chillida and Laia Estruch. A garden by the acclaimed landscape designer Piet Oudolf runs alongside the gallery buildings, incorporating native perennials and plants suited to the Mediterranean climate. The on-site restaurant Cantina, run by local restaurant and vineyard Binifadet, serves seasonal and local produce. The gallery shop is found in the same building, presenting art publications and crafts by local makers.
Exhibitions on view
Christina Quarles
17 Jun – 29 Oct
This summer, Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles will unveil new paintings and works on paper at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. ‘Come In From An Endless Place,’ her first exhibition in Spain, coincides with a major presentation at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and follows her participation in last year’s celebrated exhibition ‘The Milk Of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale.
Quarles’ critically acclaimed canvases and drawings display fragmented, polymorphous bodies embedded in rich, textural patterns – a singular approach to figuration, unique to the artist’s visual rhetoric and her fascination with the subject of bodily experience. Tangled arms and legs transform across her paintings, while perspectival planes bisect bodies, simultaneously grounding and dislocating them in space. In her initial approach to the canvas, Quarles begins by making marks that evolve into line drawings of human forms and body parts. She then photographs the work and uses Adobe Illustrator to draw the backgrounds and structures that ultimately surround the figures. In a reversal of the conventional layering of a composition, Quarles’ figures precede and even dictate the environment that they come to inhabit.
As a queer, cis-gendered woman born to a Black father and a white mother, Quarles has described her position of engagement with the world as ‘multiply situated,’ an experience of embodiment reflected in her sui generis art. The intersection of Quarles’ figures and planes analogize the imagined and prescribed boundaries of identity. ‘Fixed categories of identity can be used to marginalize but, paradoxically, can be used by the marginalized to gain visibility and political power,’ Quarles has said. ‘This paradox is the central focus of my practice.’ Vibrant magentas, blues, greens, and yellows serve not as a means of describing reality but as a way of actively resisting the viewer’s instinct to assign binary classifications to the figures such as male or female, white or Black, abstract or representational.
After the Mediterranean
2 Apr – 29 Oct
Please note Hauser & Wirth Menorca will be closed from 29 May until 16 June due to installation.
Curated by curator, writer and art researcher Oriol Fontdevila, the exhibition brings together seven artists whose work addresses the social and ecological challenges affecting the region: Erola Arcalís, Adjoa Armah, Laia Estruch, artist collective Huniti Goldox, with Areej Huniti and Eliza Goldox, Omar Mismar, Sara Ouhaddou and Abi Shehu.
They present existing and new works, the latter created through a residency program taking place in Menorca over the winter often in collaboration with local makers. A public program runs alongside the exhibition, engaging learning institutions, local organizations and communities, as well as the general public.
