Hauser & Wirth’s ‘L.A. Story’ Hitches to Steve Martin’s Star

Group Exhibition L.A. Story Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood 12 September 2024–4 January 2025
West Hollywood

Actor and comedian Steve Martin is organising an exhibition devoted to Los Angeles in dialogue with Hauser & Wirth‘s Ingrid Schaffner and Mike Davis.

L.A. Story, which takes its name from Martin’s 1991 rom com of the same name, opens at the gallery’s West Hollywood location on 12 September.

The movie follows disaffected television weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Martin) as he traverses the city, at one point roller skating through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in pursuit of something deeper. A curiously invested electronic traffic sign helps him get the girl.

In a statement, Hauser said the exhibition will bring together ‘a cross-generational array of works by artists whose depictions of Los Angeles reverberate with the movie’s celebration of a place unlike any other.’

Featured works include Forian Maier-Aichen’s technicolour photo of Malibu, a Mark Bradford map of the city, and backyard swimming pools by David Hockney, Eric Fischl, and Calida Rawles.

Martin said, ‘I’m thrilled that L.A. Story is the focus of so many wonderful artists and a wonderful gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is just across the street from the Troubadour, where I first stepped foot on Santa Monica Blvd., which began my L.A. sojourn.’

Celebrity names indubitably help draw attention to exhibitions (and art news articles). Sotheby’s has pursued a strategy of inviting celebrities including Robert Pattinson and Oprah Winfrey to curate their sales, while Christie’s enlisted Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou.

Martin, however, is especially invested—figuratively and literally–in art. He appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in the 1990s and helped curate the Hammer Museum‘s 2016 exhibition of paintings by Canadian artist Lawren Harris.

Having previously collected artists such as Fischl, Cindy Sherman, and Edward Hopper, Martin began amassing works by Australian Indigenous artists in 2015, well ahead of recent market interest in them. He shared the works at two Desert Painting shows hosted by Gagosian in 2019.

‘Collecting art is my biggest hobby,’ Martin told Time magazine back in 1987. —[O]

Main image: Florian Maier-Aichen, Untitled (2023). C-print 119.4 x 153.7 cm. © Florian Maier-Aichen. Courtesy the artist and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York. Photo: Justin Craun.