Hauser & Wirth Is Donating 10 Percent of All Sales Proceeds From Its Virtual Shows to the World Health Organization

The
leading international art gallery Hauser & Wirth is donating 10
percent of its online sales proceeds to the World Health
Organization (WHO), the UN agency leading the fight against the
coronavirus pandemic.

“We
cannot make protective masks. Other people are doing that,” gallery
cofounder Iwan Wirth tells Artnet News. “But in the art world, we can raise
money.”

The gallery’s next online
exhibition, which opens on Friday, will feature works by George
Condo, with solo exhibitions by Lorna Simpson and Rashid Johnson to
follow.

“All three will hopefully be very successful and most likely
will be sold out” Wirth says. They follow the gallery’s inaugural
online show of Louise Bourgeois’s drawings, which is launched last
week.

Iwan and Manuela Wirth, along with gallery co-director Marc Payot along with other
colleagues and gallery artists, chose to help the WHO because of the scale of
the rapidly worsening pandemic, particularly as it spreads from the
developed world to poorer countries.

“We
felt that charitable action is needed, but it is needed on a global
scale,” Wirth says. 

The mega-gallery is also
considering how it can best help communities and artists in the
many cities around the world where it has
galleries. 

“We need to turn our attention
to the local situation beyond the health crisis,” says Wirth, who
sits on the boards of several nonprofit arts institutions,
including the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the California
Institute of the Arts.

“They
live off two things, sponsors and their annual fundraising events,”
Wirth said, referring to arts nonprofits in general. “Imagine what
is going to happen in the fall? The annual events won’t happen and
the sponsors are gone.” CalArts’s supporters, he says, have already
pulled together some emergency funds. 

Wirth,
who is working from home in Somerset in the West of England, near
where Hauser & Wirth has its rural gallery, says one of the major
lessons to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic was the need for a
worldwide response to a worldwide problem. 

“This
type of crisis cannot be solved by governments,” he says. “That’s
why it has become so bad. It needs to be a global
response.” 

He
adds that televised images of the exodus of more than 1.5 million
migrant workers in India amid the country’s lockdown confirmed
Hauser & Wirth’s decision that it should focus on supporting the
WHO.

“We are busy working on online exhibitions, but you realize we are privileged in the
West. Wherever you look, the one organization that is always there
is the World Health Organization.”

The post Hauser & Wirth Is Donating 10 Percent of All Sales
Proceeds From Its Virtual Shows to the World Health
Organization appeared first on artnet News.