On September 15, 2026, Hauser & Wirth announced its global representation of Los Angeles-based painter Lucy Bull. Rather than orchestrating an exclusive departure, the mega-gallery is taking on the 36-year-old artist in collaboration with David Kordansky Gallery, her primary representative since March 2021. The alliance pairs Kordansky’s foundational West Coast base with Hauser & Wirth’s expansive international footprint across Europe and Asia, marking a pivotal new chapter for one of contemporary painting’s most closely watched figures.
The partnership will manifest swiftly. In October 2026, Hauser & Wirth will showcase Bull’s recent painting 17:44 (2026) at Art Basel Paris, followed by her first solo exhibition with the gallery scheduled for June 2027 at its Limmatstrasse venue in Zurich.
Navigating the Secondary Market Surge
Bull’s entrance into the mega-gallery tier follows an extraordinary period of secondary market velocity. After making her auction debut in 2022, her layered, process-driven abstractions—crafted through meticulous color accumulation and the scraping away of material with knife blades—ignited fierce competition.
Between 2021 and 2022, primary market prices for Bull’s work at art fairs ranged between $55,000 and $65,000 through David Kordansky Gallery. Over that same span, auction results surged into the hundreds of thousands within months. According to ArtTactic, 29 of Bull’s works went under the hammer across New York, Hong Kong, and London between 2022 and late 2023, generating over $11.3 million with fees. HENI records place her overall auction turnover at roughly $28 million by mid-2024, with nearly $11 million concentrated between 2022 and 2024.
Between 2022 and 2024, Bull crossed the seven-figure threshold at auction at least seven times. Highlights include Flash Chamber (2020), which fetched 13.76 million HKD (approximately $1.76 million) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in October 2023, and 16:10 (2020), which brought $1.81 million during Sotheby’s New York “The Now” evening sale in May 2024. That benchmark climbed even higher in 2024 when 18:50 (2021) realized 18.5 million HKD (roughly $2.4 million) at Christie’s Hong Kong.
This rapid ascent also brought market volatility. Advisors and industry observers noted several prominent paintings circulating through auction houses multiple times within just two to three years of their creation. In response, both Bull and Kordansky have publicly voiced caution regarding speculative activity, prioritizing rigorous screening for primary market placements.
Institutional Depth and Global Machinery
Hauser & Wirth’s co-representation introduces significant structural support to balance this secondary market demand. The gallery maintains a dedicated apparatus for institutional placements, museum gifts, curatorial outreach, and monographic documentation through Hauser & Wirth Publishers.
Crucially, the gallery has begun contextualizing Bull’s output alongside historical pioneers of surrealism and abstraction within its roster, invoking figures such as Arshile Gorky, Frank Bowling, and Luchita Hurtado. This framing reinforces a trajectory that already holds substantial institutional weight. Bull had solo museum exhibitions at The Warehouse in Dallas and Shanghai’s Long Museum West Bund in 2023, followed by her first US museum solo survey, Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami (2024–2025), which featured her 39-foot staircase installation 13:13.
Her works have already entered prominent permanent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), ICA Miami, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and MAMCO Geneva.
As Hauser & Wirth prepares to unveil 17:44 in Paris ahead of Bull’s 2027 Zurich solo debut, the joint arrangement with David Kordansky establishes a coordinated defense against short-term speculation, aiming to anchor one of the decade’s most prominent young painters firmly within institutional history.