NEW YORK— Rumors that have been flying around the art world for months are finally being resolved today with the official announcement that Hauser & Wirth, one of Europe’s biggest and most important dealerships, with galleries in Zurich and London and a roster of more than 30 artists, is opening a gallery in New York this September. The building at 32 East 69th Street, currently home to Zwirner & Wirth (and Hauser & Wirth’s private American office) will be reconfigured to include a four-story gallery and event space, so that what's recently been described as Europe’s “top international gallery” will finally have a full primary-market presence in the city. “We feel we simply must be in New York to properly represent all of our artists in a truly international way,” president and owner Iwan Wirth, who founded the firm with his wife, Manuela Wirth, and Ursula Hauser in Zurich in 1992, told ARTINFO.

In an indication of the seriousness of its intentions, the firm is inaugurating the New York gallery with something of an art-historical coup. The Upper East Side space was for many years home to the legendary Martha Jackson Gallery, which in 1961 hosted one of happenings guru Allan Kaprow’s best-known environments, Yard. Now, Hauser & Wirth, which represents Kaprow’s estate, will recreate the work — comprising hundreds of car tires and a family of strange, paper-wrapped objects — for the first time ever in its original location. Helen Molesworth, head of Harvard University’s department of modern and contemporary art, will curate the project, with the eager cooperation of Barry Rosen, adviser to the Kaprow estate, who praises Hauser & Wirth for its “great commitment to all kinds of unsellable things.”

“We see Yard as an amazing opportunity to connect past, present, and future,” Wirth said.

Hauser & Wirth’s arrival in the city will also occasion a departure: that of Zwirner & Wirth, the secondary-market company that Wirth has operated with David Zwirner since 2000. “It doesn’t make sense that Zwirner & Wirth continue as a gallery, but of course the business will continue,” said Marc Payot, the Hauser & Wirth partner and vice president who will become director of the New York operation. “The collaboration between Iwan and David is based on a very, very long friendship.”

The Zwirner & Wirth gallery will be replaced by a new one, simply named Zwirner and located on the ground floor of Shigeru Ban’s Metal Shutter Houses across from David Zwirner’s existing gallery complex on West 19th Street. The dealer told ARTINFO that he was “especially happy to welcome my friends and colleagues from Hauser & Wirth to New York,” and said that the opening of the two new galleries made this “a really exciting and positive moment.” His new space opens in September as well.

Of course, not everyone sees this particular moment as an advantageous one, at least economically, but Wirth, a famously shrewd operator, is insistently optimistic. “We have almost always opened our galleries in difficult economic moments,” he said. “Hauser & Wirth was actually founded during the recession in 1992, and I remember people feeling sorry for me that we had missed the ‘amazing eighties.’ We opened London in 2002–03, in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, and at a moment when D’Offay closed and everyone laid off staff. Given that history, I am not afraid of the current difficult climate and actually think we are in a great position to take advantage of opportunities the environment offers now.”

Payot, for one, is taking the long view. “We are a commercial gallery, and of course we sell art,” the new gallery director said. “That’s a very important part of what we do. But the whole approach is much broader than that. We have a worldwide operation with close to 50 employees who support the careers of the artists. It’s a very long-term commitment.” And Wirth goes further, claiming the firm, known for its success with such high-profile artists as Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, and Roni Horn, is “devoted first and foremost to an ongoing exploration of ideas and the possibilities of art as a transformational part of contemporary life” — words that seem positively anachronistic in these troubled times for the market.