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Hauser & Wirth, one of the largest galleries in the world, now represents Los Angeles–based artist rafa esparza, who is best-known for his installations, sculptures, and paintings made from adobe. The representation will be done in collaboration with LA’s Commonwealth and Council, the artist’s longtime gallery.
The news makes esparza one of the few living Latinx artists to be represented by a mega-gallery. Hauser & Wirth also represents Firelei Baéz and Angel Otero.
esparza will have his first solo show with the gallery in fall 2027 in one of its New York spaces, and he will debut a new work at Hauser & Wirth’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth next month. Next February, Zolo Press will publish his first monograph, titled rafa esparza: Works on Adobe.
Since 2014, esparza has been working with adobe, a building material that combines loam, straw, manure, and water, typically to make bricks that are then baked in the sun. esparza learned the technique from his father, whose family has been using adobe for generations in Durango, Mexico.
Initially, esparza began making adobe bricks that he would use to transform and challenge the art spaces in which they are exhibited: The organic materials in adobe counter museums’ strict climate control settings, while the “brown architectures,” as the artist calls his creations, take on their white cubes. Many of his interventions allow for visitors to walk directly on the adobe, which begins to crumble during the exhibition’s run.
He memorably presented these works at the 2016 Made in L.A. biennial (on an outdoor terrace) and the 2017 Whitney Biennial (in the Whitney’s ground floor gallery). The Whitney Biennial work took the form of a rotunda which esparza invited Latinx artists who were not formally part of the biennial to exhibit their work or stage performances; his collaborators included Beatriz Cortez, Gala Porras-Kim, Eamon Ore-Girón, and Nao Bustamante. The bricks used in the Whitney installation were then transported to Marfa, Texas, where they were installed on the facade and interior of Ballroom Marfa.
More recently, esparza has begun painting directly onto the adobe, creating works intimate portraits, medium-sized translations of photographs documenting important historical moments, and large-scale sculptures that are supported by metal armatures that are visible from behind. Tratos: Después de Pedro Valtierra Entre Redadas (2025–26), for example, had a US flag embedded in the metal structure, which supported a painting of a police officer manhandling a protester.
He has staged performances and had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (in 2018), the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2018), Performance Space New York (2019), and Artists Space (2023). With Cortez, he has had two-person exhibitions at the Americas Society in New York (2025) and the Museo Anahuacali in Mexico City (2026). Other important group shows that his work has been featured in include “Xican-a.o.x Body” at the Cheech (2023), “At the Edge of the Sun” at Jeffrey Dietch in Los Angeles (2024), the Prospect.6 triennial in New Orleans (2025), and the Latinx painting survey “Let us Gather in a Flourishing Way” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2026).
“We are thrilled to join Commonwealth and Council in representing rafa esparza, an artist of profound humanity and dedication to community,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement. “rafa brings real warmth to a conceptual practice that is enormously rigorous and disciplined, drawing the earth quite literally into works that mark time and the human hand while harkening to centuries of challenging questions about ownership, agency and belonging. It will be an honor to share his art with increasingly international audiences and new generations.”