Actor and Art Collector Steve Martin Organizes a Love Letter to LA with Hauser & Wirth

L.A. Story is the name of a 1991 movie written by Steve Martin that the Los Angeles Times once voted the greatest Los Angeles–set film of the 20th century. It will also be the name of a Hauser & Wirth show co-organized by Martin with curator Ingrid Schaffner and senior director Mike Davis. The show will kick off the fall season in LA this year.

The show, due to open September 12 at the gallery giant’s West Hollywood location, will feature landscapes, abstractions, and more that all contain an Angeleno flavor, per the gallery. Although there will be representations of Los Angeles landmarks here, the gallery allows that some works will not explicitly depict the city, since the show’s approach is “far from literal.”

Certain works, such as paintings of rippling water by David Hockney and Calida Rawles, will allude to the backyards of many Los Angeles homes that have swimming pools. And a Vija Celmins painting of a hand firing a gun will be enlisted to speak to Hollywood genre filmmaking. Naturally, a number of famed LA-based artists, from Mark Bradford to Ed Ruscha, will figure in the exhibition.

Martin said in a statement, “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.”

Martin, who appeared several times on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list during the 1990s, has some prior curatorial experience: he helped organize the Hammer Museum’s Lawren Harris show in 2016.