We are delighted to present to you Collecteurs at Home, a series focusing on private art collectors and their stories. Realized with an aim to foster dialogue around art and the importance of sharing, Collecteurs at Home consists of a brief introduction where each participant discusses a works from their collection.
Since 2014, the Venet Foundation has been home to Bernar Venet’s impressive collection. The artist spoke with Collecteurs from his foundation’s growing complex in the picturesque Le Muy commune in southeastern France.
image left: James Turrell / Elliptic Ecliptic, 1999. Courtesy Venet Foundation.
Frank Stella Chapel at Venet Foundation
Evrim Oralkan: It’s fair to say you have one of the world’s most impressive art collections, developed through exchanges with fellow artists like Donald Judd in the ’60s and ’70s. When did it start to become the collection as the world knows it now, and when did you get the idea to open it to the public?
Bernar Venet: Donald Judd was my neighbor, he was living just around the corner, and I knew him already since 1967. We had many points in common. He liked to collect himself; he also liked to be surrounded by furniture that he was making himself. He was interested in architecture also. So, we had many things to discuss. Although I was much younger and I was a little kid with them, they liked me because I had a good eye. But most of the time they were exchanges or exchange and a little bit of money when I started to make money. For me, money in the bank doesn’t mean anything because I see that the banks are collecting art with my money, so why don’t I take my money and buy the art myself?
Watch our video interview with Bernar Venet on his experiences building the Venet Foundation as well as what it’s like to be both an artist and a collector.
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A surgeon and a political theory professor, and passionate art collectors, Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall recount their story of acquiring Lavender Boy, 2019 by Salman Toor.
An avid collector and the Managing Director of the Grand Hotel Miramare in Santa Margherita Ligure in Liguria, Italy, Andrea Fustinoni presents his favorite piece, Leigh Ledare’s Walt (2013).
image left: Leigh Ledare – Walt (2013). Courtesy the Fustinoni and D’Amato Collection.
Andrea Fustinoni: I’m grateful to Collecteurs for letting me introduce one of my favorite artworks from the collection by Leigh Ledare (Seattle, 1977), an American artist based in New York. Thanks to Paolo Zani, Zero Gallery’s owner, I approached Leigh’s work during Artissima Art Fair in 2012. On that occasion, when visiting the Reception Gallery booth where Leigh’s work was being exhibited, Paolo had enthusiastic words for him and his art, and suggested that we incorporate one of his pieces into our collection. That’s how Mom with Mask (2002) ended up in our apartment. This was my first approach to Leigh but, one year later, at Frieze Art Fair, while visiting The Box Gallery booth, I saw Walt and it was love at first sight.
Greek art collector and founder of the Office gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus, Anastasios A. Gkekas shares not one but three notable works from his private collection, including Iranian artist Nazgol Ansarinia’s Metal Chair (2013).
image left: Nazgol Ansarinia – Metal Chair (2013) from the series Private Assortment. Photography: Antonis Minas. Courtesy the Office Collection / Anastasios A. Gkekas.
Anastasios A. Gkekas: As a peripheral collector from a Hellenic background, I don’t find it particularly lucrative or elegant to exercise favouritism in the sense that I have one single choice [of artwork] set against all others. For me, that’s like asking what is better or more canonical: ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’? Or having to choose between who it is preferable to read on the theme of love: Plato’s Symposium or Nietzsche’s relevant aphorisms? Taken to such a degree, favouritism empties itself of meaning. That said, a few works are of equal importance to me. I will mention three pieces that are based in different locations:
Masahisa Fukase – Tsugaru Channel (1984) from the Raven series. Photography: Antonis Minas. Courtesy the Office Collection / Anastasios A. Gkekas.
The first work is located in the house across the Archangel Michael Trypiotis Church, in Nicosia, Cyprus. It is a signed vintage photo from the Japanese photographer, Masahisa Fukase, purchased from Rose Gallery in Los Angeles. It is Fukase’s photo from the Ravens series; it captures a scene from the Tsugaru Channel in Japan. The scene depicts a wild sea and sky, contiguous in such a way that it is not possible to discern the borders separating the two natural elements. The photograph was chosen among variations – another was available, a later example on the same topic, the exact image that can be found in the photobook. After I discussed it with the dancer and choreographer, Harris Gkekas, we ended up choosing the wilder seascape – specifically due to a recurrent nightmare of his, connected to a beach house in our childhood.
Nazgol Ansarinia – Metal Chair (2013) from the series Private Assortment. Photography: Antonis Minas. Courtesy the Office Collection / Anastasios A. Gkekas.
The second piece is currently at my office, near the buffer zone in Nicosia. It is a chair that belongs to the Iranian [artist], Nazgol Ansarinia, [from her] Private Assortment (2011-2013) series_._ The chair, which was acquired via Green Art Gallery in the UAE, hides an individual’s personal, everyday belongings, and seems to function as a quick getaway, bringing you back to yourself amid the alienation that a life lived in cities such as Tehran entails. The intonation is in what remains hidden. Even the micro-world of your private life – something that is not supposed to concern anyone else – becomes a mere shadow of you, one that you seek to hide out of instinct in the daily automatisms of your behaviour.
Robert Montgomery – The City Is Wilder Than You Think (2012). Photography: Antonis Minas. Courtesy the Office Collection / Anastasios A. Gkekas.
The third and final piece is located in my apartment in Paris, across Serge Gainsbourg’s house, and is a rare watercolour by Robert Montgomery. The artist and poet is also an old friend of mine, and used to occasionally say: ‘Tassos, don’t the collectors understand how precious my watercolour texts could be? They are the very basis for multiple iterations of my other works which use the same forms, like woodcut panels, neo-lighting, fire poems and so on…’
To share some of my own principles of curation with you, I like works which somehow confirm that the artist’s heart remained in the right place during their creative production. There is a special, intrinsic momentum in this, and I see the works I collect as examples of this sublime balance. Unfortunately, it seems there is frequently a time, a moment where the artist can become too self-aware about his or her position in the business of art. When that happens, the momentum is de facto lost and, as I put it, the artist’s soul loses its hunger to be a part of the world. It disconnects: that original innocence, hungriness and vitality are somehow taken away as art-making becomes a formula. One might expect the contrary and wish that artists would take advantage of the artistic freedom granted by recognition, but often when artists become established they tend, in their self-awareness, to risk even less than in earlier stages of their careers.
What excites me in all of these small-scale works is the intense concentration of emotional content, and its symbiotic relationship with a volcanic, distinctive and individual signature or concept imprinted on each of them. The possibility of my eyes continuing to register those kinds of coincidences has become tragically rare, par excellence, in the business of contemporary art. Don’t you agree? The conceptual part may persist in a volume of works, but something is missing: somehow, for some reason, the spirit may be lost in the artists’ later works. It possibly gets too detached, a bit too technical, a bit too predictable, and, on my eyes, terribly cold. I’ll let a Herman Broch passage explain how things can go wrong:
[H]e knew of the innermost danger of all artists, he knew the utter loneliness of the man destined to be an artist, he knew the inherent loneliness which drove such a one into the still deeper loneliness of art and into the beauty that cannot be articulated, and he knew that for the most part such men were shattered by this immolation, that it made them blind, blind to the world, blind to the divine quality in the world and in the fellow-man, that–intoxicated by their loneliness–they were able to see only their own god-likeness, which they imagined to be unique, and consequently this self-idolatry and its greed for recognition came more and more to be the sole content of their work–, a betrayal of the divine as well as of art, because in this fashion the work of art became a work of un-art, an unchaste covering for artistic vanity, so spurious that even the artist’s self-complacent nakedness which it exposed became a mask; and even though such unchaste self-gratification, such dalliance with beauty, such concern with effects, even though such an un-art might, despite its brief unrenewable grant, its inextensible boundaries, find an easier way to the populace than real art ever found, it was only a specious way, a way out of the loneliness, but not, however, an affiliation with the human community, which was the aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity, no, it was the affiliation with the mob, it was a participation in its treacherous non-community, which was incapable of the pledge, which neither created nor mastered any reality, and which was unwilling to do so, preferring only to drowse on, forgetting reality, having forfeited it as had un-art and literarity, this was the most profound danger for every artist; oh how painfully, how very painfully he knew this.
Hermann Broch – The Death of Virgil (1945)
The replies to this interview were given in October among heavy travelling in Europe and the Middle East.
Edit by Devin Wangert. A special thank you to Yesim Uygur Ozel.
German art dealer and founder of König Galerie, Johann König takes us on a visit to his garden to tell us why he loves Tatiana Trouvé’s Waterfall (2013).
Reminiscing about the origins of his love for art, collector Pedro Gomes shares four contemporary artworks from the Gomes Collection, detailing the meaning they hold for him as well as the stories of how he came to acquire them.
Pedro Gomes: When I received the kind invitation from Collecteurs to share some of the works of art that have entered my life and share my living space, it led me to reflect on how and why this process of living together with works of art started. I was unable to obtain a clear and precise answer. However, this led me to return to my childhood. Whenever one of my brothers or I behaved badly or had bad grades in school—usually it was I—my mother had a habit: as punishment, we would have to stay in front of a picture (painting, engraving, lithograph, or an art album). Then, we would have to present a report or write a composition on what we had been looking at. That which at the time was a punishment we didn’t like, later became a special way of penetrating the works of art in their narratives, in the ways of observation—to such an extent that my older brothers procured at newsstands brochures on art which we kids shared, genuinely intrigued and fascinated.
It was particularly difficult to select some of the works of art. But finally, I decided on those which were remarkable in the way they provoked, disturbed, and captured me—and, above all, awakened an inclination in the manner in which I observed or adhered to a certain artistic work.
The first work has exactly to do with this fantasy universe into which the observer is allowed—the space registered on film is a photograph of the interior of a cardboard box. The photograph is Suco Verde by Lucia Koch, 2017. All constructions become possible and it is the light—a streak of light—that allows those dreams and fantasies to emerge. This work was acquired at an auction in Brazil at the time of the current far-right president’s election. It was a fundraiser in support of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon defending their land. I believe that Lucia Koch creates new spaces and challenges us to experience them in new ways. This series of photographs of cardboard boxes has a clear architectural reference with the creation of imaginary spaces from common materials, somewhat similar to the maquettes found in the ateliers of architects. It is here where our perception is made from the interior of the spaces with a distinctive orientation. This view from the interior of the box—with the effect of light—provokes and disconcerts the observer, allowing him to reenter the realm of the imaginary, of dreams, of creation. In this sense, the image of that “box” acquires other heights and reaches other personal universes, and that which serves to contain something becomes the contents of something.
A second work is cardboard and plastic sewn with thread by Zé Maria Ardisson: Untitled (casas de cartão), 2020, OT. In this work, Zé Maria shows us the houses he passed through in his childhood, taking refuge in their architectural models. He places them in appropriate cartography, a grill which securely shows the living stages. Very delicately sewn together with thread, this is where one perceives, very lightly, the word “fragile” on the protective plastics for the transport of goods. Once again, the observer is questioned about the fragility which is “habitat” or “place,” and a “dependence” in determined periods of our existence which mark us indelibly. This view of elemental material was more appellative coming from an artist who, when I met him, said that if he could he would spend the day in water. This precariousness/volatility of life spaces and the search for a place (possibly imaginative) molds his work. This incessant search for place utilizing common domestic material never lets us convoke, direct or indirectly, that which represents (and remits to) water—an uncontrollable, free, fluid, reinvigorating element.
The third work belongs to the Portuguese artist living and working in the UK, Hugo Brazão. I encountered the work of Hugo through an extraordinary project of four Portuguese artists, the Las Palmas Project created in 2017. In 2019, Las Palmas invited Hugo Brazão for a solo exhibit called Take Ten. When I was at the exhibit, I was immediately enchanted by one work, even though the author consistently gave us a description of the artworks present. That was Everything Will Be Fine (Cochineal Extraction), 2019, a work in wool and linen. The first impact was the manner in which he explored the plastic properties of the materials, in such a way as to give them an almost infantile, innocent expression. There is a connection between the parts, some dynamic, others static, with diverse chromatic densities in a final, logical construction that is free, uncompromising, refreshing, and ironic. It is the only work that lives with me but, given its dimensions, I cannot have it adequately exhibited. During the winter it sleeps at my feet on the bed, my private “bed bug,” a warm color for the gray days.
Lastly, there is the work of artist Rui Castanho, “Magicians Playing Magic,” 2018. I saw one of the artist’s sculptures on Instagram and wanted to know his work better. On his site, I selected some works I would particularly to see and we set a date for a studio visit. When I entered the studio, I saw, on the opposite side of the room to where the artist had put the works I had chosen to see, a magnificent painting in aerograph and acrylic. Similar to the preceding work, perhaps some esthetic ascendant had channeled my attention to this work, which has at its base and origin the detail of a book on Art Brut. I thought I was going to meet a sculptor; however, I discovered that the pictorial domain of this piece was evident. Nothing in this painting suggests an evasion of his domain, enough in itself in its line, shape, and color. It is not by chance that it is titled Magicians; the illusion is omnipresent in the painting. This is something the artist systematically uses in his works and sculptures. Different from the illusion incited by the plasticity of objects (and in the way in which he intentionally displays them) here the illusion is suggested by the design, by the creation of the image, by the shapes, by that which troubles us, by the questions we ask ourselves about what can or cannot be. This forces us to detain in front of a painting; it does not leave us indifferent, insensitive. It creates awareness in us.
It is extremely difficult to condense my love of art and the objects of art with which we live into four works. However, this task of choosing meant not only the selection asked for but, above all, it signals that there is a trait common to all of them. There exists something of the infantile, of lightness, something of the ironic, of illusion, and of the imagination possible. And the imagination, the creative and fanciful illusions—the constructions which emanate from other constructions—bring us happiness, comfort, space, and identity. It is this vitality that art brings to my life and the way in which it shares my every day. Artworks are not only my refuge: I make them mine, build my identity with them, construct my place—a space that, even though it may be seen as socially marginal, allows to curb fear in a way that is creative and exciting.