This is the second part of our two-part artnet News Index of art collectors. To see the first 50 collectors, published June 13, 2016, with our introduction to the series, see “The artnet News Index: The World’s Top 100 Art Collectors for 2016, Part One.“
51. Joseph Lau (China)
A real estate mogul who is also a fugitive from justice (he was convicted of bribery in Macau in 2014), Lau came to the attention of the art world when he snapped up an Andy Warhol Mao portrait for $17.4 million at Christie’s in 2006 and Paul Gauguin‘s Te Poipoi (The Morning) (1892) at Sotheby’s for $39.2 million in 2007. He once again garnered headlines last year when he bought a $48 million diamond for his seven-year-old daughter.
52. Aaron and Barbara Levine (United States)
While Aaron makes money as a lawyer suing Big Pharma, the passion that he and his wife Barbara share is a love for conceptual art. “I’m a Duchamp wacko,” Aaron told artnet News. “I’m also On Kawara crazy,” Aaron added. The couple’s collection includes works by On Kawara, Robert Barry, Christopher Williams, Joana Vasconcelos, and Marcel Duchamp (they own 25 of the Frenchman’s seminal works). Recently, the Levines bought four pieces by Czech sculptor Stanislav Kolibal.
53. Adam Lindemann (United States)
Writer, dealer, advisor, and collector, Lindemann doesn’t just a commentator on the art market for the New York Times, he is also a ubiquitous presence at New York’s art auctions. After selling a Basquiat for $57 million at Christie’s in May, Lindemann found himself bidding, unsuccessfully, for a Calder mobile. That frustrated purchase notwithstanding, Lindemann tells artnet News that he has successfully chased down other Calder sculptures this year, along with a number of works of Oceanic tribal art. Lindemann says he also spends a small fortune on vintage race cars.
54. Eugenio Lopez (Mexico)
The scion of the Jumex bottled fruit juice empire, Alonso revitalized the contemporary art scene in Mexico City in the 1990s by launching the Jumex collection. In 2013, the David Chipperfield-designed Museo Jumex brought Mexico headlong into the global art circuit. The museum, which includes some 2,000 artworks, boasts first-rate pieces by contemporary masters including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Brice Marden, John Chamberlain, and Louise Bourgeois.
55. Michael Lynne (United States)
Movie mogul Lynne (he’s the co-founder of New Line Cinema and producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) started collecting when he was a young showbiz lawyer in the early 1980s. According to the New York Post, he horse-traded legal advice in exchange for artworks by then-unknown talents like Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, and Julian Schnabel. Lynne’s collection has since swollen to include works by hundreds of present-day blue chip and emerging artists. The film producer serves on the board of trustees at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
56. Yusaku Maezawa (Japan)
If only all collectors were like Yusaku Maezawa. The Japanese fashion mogul dropped $98 million on two consecutive days in May, making him a hero of New York’s spring auctions. Between May 1 and May 2 at Christie’s, he bought an untitled 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat for a record $57.3 million, as well as works by Richard Prince ($9.6 million), Jeff Koons ($6.8 million), Alexander Calder ($5.7 million), Bruce Nauman ($1.7 million), Adrian Ghenie ($2.6 million), and Christopher Wool ($13.9 million). By the time Maezawa’s shopping cart was full, he’d spent enough to cover one quarter of Christie’s total evening sale profits for the spring, according to Bloomberg. The collector is now among the most talked about—and newest—high rollers on the scene.
57. Fatima and Eskandar Maleki (United Kingdom)
In the news in 2015 because of bitter suit against their former advisor Amir Shariat, the Iranian-born Malekis remain a stable presence in the British art world. In October, Fatima was seen bidding actively at Sotheby’s London for a 1990 sculpture by Isa Genzken that hammered down at £677,000 ($1 million). Despite former oil-company executive Eskandar being retired since 2008, the couple remain very active.
58. Martin Margulies (United States)
Self-made millionaire real-estate developer and philanthropist Margulies is the bedrock upon which the so-called “Miami Model” of collecting is based—one in which private collectors open their art to the public. Margulies has amassed more than 4,000 pieces over 30 years of collecting—which include works by, among others, Willem de Kooning, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Richard Serra—and he has no intention of stopping or selling. His namesake Margulies Collection, housed in a 45,000 square foot warehouse in the Wynwood District, is widely known for displaying the city’s best art.
59. Peter Marino (United States)
An architect who specializes in designing flashy retail stores, Marino is also a big time collector of contemporary art and Renaissance bronzes. In 2015, he lent a large swath of his art collection to Miami’s Bass Museum of Art for the show “One Way: Peter Marino” (the exhibition is on tour throughout various Asian museums until 2017). In January, the black leather-clad Marino curated a Robert Mapplethorpe show at Paris’s Galerie Thaddeus Ropac (he is said to own 140 Mapplethorpe images).
60. Donald Marron (United States)
A former president of MoMA’s board of trustees, the CEO of Lightyear Capital has a private collection that includes works by Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, and Gerhard Richter. Marron was CEO of PaineWebber before its merger with UBS and is known for both creating PaineWebber’s renowned art collection and for arranging for a gift of 44 works from the collection to MoMA. “Contemporary art reflects the society that creates it,” Marron told the New York Times in 2002, when the gift was announced, “and Wall Street is certainly a part of that.”
61. Raymond J. McGuire (United States)
The Global Head of Investment Banking in Citigroup, McGuire heads up several museum boards, including the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies in Washington DC and New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, and International Center for Photography. His collection is said to be especially strong in African American artists and includes works by Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, Malick Sidibé, Gary Simmons, and Lorna Simpson.
62. Leonid Mikhelson (Russia)
Mikhelson, Russia’s richest man according to Forbes, is the founder of the V-A-C Foundation, an impressive contemporary art collection that the billionaire plans to house in a Renzo Piano-redesigned tsarist-era power plant on the banks of the Moskva river. Moscow’s answer to London’s Tate Modern, Mikhelson’s new museum will differ from traditional art museums. As the collector told the Moscow Times, he aims for V-A-C to function “as an ‘agora’ — a place where young artists can actively interact with each other and connect with the global art scene.”
63. Simon and Catriona Mordant (Australia)
Simon Mordant is the executive co-chairman of the corporate consulting firm Luminis Partners. He is also the chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and in June 2016 joined the board of the American Academy in Rome, which awards the Rome Prize, a prestigious American award to emerging artists and scholars whose past recipients include Nari Ward and Agnes Denes. An avid collector, Mordant’s store of loot includes works by Tracey Emin, Yinka Shonibare, Bill Viola, Jeremy Deller, and Yoko Ono.
64. Arif Naqvi (United Kingdom)
The chief executive of the private equity firm the Abraaj Group, the Pakistani-born, Dubai-based Naqvi is a big player in the developing world’s expanding art scene. An important collector himself, he created the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2008, largely as a way of supporting the production of work from the so-called MENASA region (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia)—all while commissioning artworks for the Abraaj Group’s corporate collection. Navqvi’s Abraaj Group is widely acknowledged to be the undisputed financial backbone of Art Dubai.
65. Philip Niarchos (Greece)
The scion of a shipping and collecting dynasty, Niarchos inherited the art collection of his late father, shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, estimated to be among the most valuable in the world. Among the works in the collection is Pablo Picasso’s self portrait Yo, Picasso (1901), which Stavros purchased in 1989 for $47,850,000 and Andy Warhol’s Shot Red Marilyn (1964), which Philip purchased in 1994 for $3.63 million. Forbes lists Philip as the 688th richest person in Europe—and his art holdings as the “origin of his wealth.”
66. François Odermatt (Canada)
One of Montreal’s biggest collectors of contemporary art, the French-Canadian Odermatt is known for his preference for large-scale painting. Last January the collector bought a Jonas Wood painting from LA dealer David Kordansky and commissioned a 100-foot painting by Takashi Murakami, with plans to offer it to a museum in the future. In a phone interview with artnet News, Odermatt said of the Murakami: “It will create a little earthquake in the art market.”
67. Bernardo de Mello Paz (Brazil)
The force behind Brazil’s Instituto Inhotim, a sprawling sculpture park that extends across 5,000 acres with 24 pavilions devoted to individual contemporary artists, Paz has engineered the perfect combination museum-cum-art-safari. Among the artists the mining tycoon has blessed with their own pavilion are Doug Aitken, Doris Salcedo, Olafur Eliasson, and Anish Kapoor. Among his first-rate team of art specialists are creative director Allan Schwartzman (of Art Agency Partners), Jochen Volz (curator of the 32nd São Paulo Biennial), and new curator Marta Mestre (ex-curator at Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro).
68. José Olympio da Veiga Pereira (Brazil)
The chairman of the board of trustees at São Paulo’s Pinacoteca—as well as a member of the boards of MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Paris’s Fondation Cartier—da Veiga Pereira is planning on shoring up his city’s flagging cultural scene by exhibiting an important part of his 2,000-piece-strong collection. In September, he will display up to 400 of his works at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The show will be organized by the American critic and curator Robert Storr.
69. Jorge Perez (United States) NEW!
In 2011, the developer and art collector traded $40 million in cash and art to put his name on what was to become the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Since then, Pérez has spent an additional $10 million on artwork and donations for the museum, according to the Miami Herald. Pérez personally counted down some of these purchases for artnet News. The list includes pieces by Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, Sarah Morris, Elizabeth Murray, Ed Moses, Kiki Smith, Alex Katz, Doris Salcedo, Julio Le Parc, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Amorales, Juan Davila, Jorge Macchi, Los Carpinteros, and Carlos Garaicoa. Additionally, Pérez co-funds a $1 million program for African-American and African diaspora artists with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
70. Catherine Petitgas (United Kingdom)
A highly influential Latin-American art collector, the London-based Petitgas is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks Triangle Network, London, and a member of the Tate Latin American Acquisitions Committee, the council of London’s Serpentine Gallery, and the International Circle of Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Currently, Petitgas has curated a show titled “Everything You Are I Am Not” at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey (until August 6). The show features more than 60 works from the Tiroche DeLeon Collection, including works by Adrián Villar Rojas, Los Carpinteros, and Maria Nepomuceno.
71. François Pinault (France)
The French luxury goods magnate and the owner of Christie’s recently announced plans to create a private museum in Paris to display his vast art collection. The museum will be housed in a former commodities exchange building and designed by Tadao Ando, the same architect who refurbished Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, which Pinault turned into a museum in 2006. Currently, the Palazzo Grassi is staging the largest-ever survey show of Sigmar Polke’s work in Italy. Pinault’s collection is estimated to include more than 3,000 works of art.
72. Janelle and Alden Pinnell (United States)
In 2011, the Pinnell’s founded the Power Station, a not-for-profit project supporting site-specific exhibitions in a former power station in Dallas, Texas. Recent projects at the Power Station have featured work by Karl Holmqvist, Olivier Mosset, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, and Michael E. Smith, among others. Alden Pinnell is a trustee of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Pinnell Foundation supports organizations such as New York’s Artists Space, Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, the Fort Worth Modern, Dallas Contemporary, and the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
Related: The Most Powerful Collectors and Patrons in Dallas
73. Ron and Ann Pizzuti (United States)
The Columbus, Ohio-based Pizzutis have spent some 40 years assembling a collection of more than 2,000 works including pieces by David Hammons, Ai Weiwei, Leandro Erlich, Darío Escobar, and John Chamberlain—many of which are on view at the Pizzuti Collection, their private museum. Most recently, the couple has turned their attention to Cuban contemporary art. Starting in September, the Pizzuti Collection will host a new exhibition of some of Cuba’s top artists: Raul Martinez, Michel Perez Pollo, Rene Francisco, Osmeivy Ortega Pacheco, Sandra Ramos, Enrique Martinez Celaya, and Roberto Diago.
74. Miuccia Prada (Italy)
Despite the fact that Prada told the Guardian that she “hate[s] the idea of being a collector,” she is one of the biggest names in arts patronage. She also clearly has a sense of humor about it. Prada reportedly has a Carsten Höller slide behind her office desk that she uses to leave her office at night. She and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, own more than 900 works of modern and contemporary art, most of which they display at their Fondazione Prada spaces in Venice and Milan. This year, their Milan venue is hosting a survey of Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin‘s work until December.
75. Howard and Cindy Rachofsky (United States)
The Texas-based collecting couple was included in our 2016 Dallas power list for good reason. Their collection consists of roughly 800 works of contemporary art that mostly fall within two broad themes: minimalism and representational work that explores “the post-war notion of identity” (in the words of the collection’s website). Among the artists represented in the collection are Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Grotjahn, Mona Hatoum, and Gerhard Richter. In 2012, Howard founded the Warehouse with his friend Vernon Faulconer, who passed away in 2015; its 16 galleries occupy 18,000 square feet of exhibition space for works drawn from both couples’ private collections as well as pieces purchased jointly with the Dallas Museum of Art.
76. Mitchell and Emily Rales (United States)
The billionaire co-founder of the Danaher Corporation and his former gallery director wife launched Glenstone, their own private museum of modern and contemporary art and outdoor sculpture, in 2006. Built near the couple’s house in Potomac, Maryland, that first effort is getting an expansion in the guise of a new 170,000-square-foot museum building that will quadruple Glenstone’s existing exhibition space. According to the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, “when finished, sometime in 2017, Glenstone will rank in the top tier of privately endowed contemporary art institutions.” The Rales’ high-end collection includes work by Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Alberto Giacometti, and Jackson Pollock.
77. David Roberts (United Kingdom)
In 2007, London-based collector Roberts launched the David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), which moved in 2012 to its current 12,000-square-foot space in Camden. Since its founding, DRAF has helped produce art works, exhibitions, performances, and events by some 680 artists, including Phyllida Barlow, Dahn Vo, Nina Beier, and Sarah Lucas. The foundation is also responsible for the David Roberts Collection, a body of over 2,000 artworks by 600 artists, including Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Bridget Riley, Eva Hesse, and Philip Guston, and opened DRAF Studio, a London space for performance art, in 2015.
78. The Rubell Family (United States)
Donald and Mera Rubell established the Rubell Family Collection in Miami in 1993 in a 45,000-square-foot former Drug Enforcement Agency warehouse. Early buyers of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Cindy Sherman, the Rubell collection has grown steadily through the decades, and exponentially through the participation of their adult children, Jason and Jennifer. Currently, the collection includes 6,800 works by 831 artists. Their latest traveling exhibition, “NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection,” will be on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., through January 8, 2017. The show includes work by more than 35 artists, including Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas, Isa Genzken, Yayoi Kusama, Josephine Meckseper, Dana Schutz, Mickalene Thomas, and Rosemarie Trockel.
79. Dmitry Rybolovlev (Russia)
Rybolovlev, the 12th richest man in Russia ($7.7 billion), has garnered a ton of headlines this year, thanks chiefly to an ongoing feud with art dealer and freeport king Yves Bouvier—with whom he spent $2 billion-plus amassing one of the world’s most expensive art collections. Subsequent stories about a high-profile divorce with his ex-wife and his appearance in the Panama Papers have only served to keep the Russian collector in the headlines. Among the artworks Rybolovlev is said to own are works by Vincent van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci.
80. Tony Salamé (Lebanon)
Art collector and founder of Middle Eastern luxury retailer Aïshti, Salamé commissioned British architect David Adjaye to complete a $100-million home for his contemporary art collection in Beirut. The resulting 40,000-square-foot Aïshti Foundation, which opened in October of 2015 is now home to some 2,000 contemporary artworks. Among the artists he collects are Wade Guyton, Danh Vō, Franz West, Carol Bove, Christopher Wool, and Richard Prince. The collector commissioned 20 artworks from Prince for his Beirut stores.
81. Patrizia Sandretto (Italy)
In 1995, Sandretto established the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a non-profit art institution. She began collecting contemporary art in the 1990s and her collection now numbers more than 1,000 pieces, including works by major art stars such as Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Hirschhorn, Cindy Sherman, and Paul McCarthy. In the last few years, Sandretto has turned her attention to a younger generation of artists. Some of the young artists she currently collects are Ian Cheng, Avery Singer, Josh Kline, Katja Novitskova, Rachel Rose, Pamela Rosenkranz, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Magali Reus, Ed Atkins, Ryan Trecartin, and Adrián Villar Rojas. “We are living a great moment in contemporary art,” she told artnet News recently.
82. Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani (Bangladesh) NEW!
Rajeeb Samdani, a Bangladeshi collector, arts philanthropist, and industrialist manages the multi-industry Golden Harvest Group and is co-chair of Tate Modern’s South Asian acquisitions committee. Together with his wife Nadia, he founded the Samdani Art Foundation in 2011 in order to shine a light on Bangladesh’s burgeoning art scene. The foundation organizes the Dhaka Art Summit, a biennial celebrating Bangladeshi art, and awards the Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh’s top arts prize. The couple recently announced that they plan to build a museum for their collection that will open in 2018.
83. Laurence and Patrick Seguin (France) NEW!
Besides running a top decorative arts gallery in Paris, the Seguins are major collectors of contemporary art themselves. As they explained in a recent communication with artnet News, the couple has been collecting for more than 20 years and began by purchasing a characteristically challenging piece by Bruce Nauman. Because they collect deep, the Seguins say nearly 50 percent of their collection is made up of the work of just 10 artists: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Bruce Nauman, Richard Prince, Mark Grotjahn, Rudolf Stingel, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Steven Shearer, and Jonas Wood. Other artists in their storied collection include Carol Bove, Wade Guyton, Haim Steinbach, and Jeff Koons.
84. Alain Servais (Belgium)
A former investment banker, Servais is a collector’s collector (as well as a critic’s collector), who regularly visits studios, galleries, art fairs, and biennials to research his purchases, many of which he displays in a 10,000-square-foot loft in what was once an industrial section of Brussels. Despite the presence of works by Joseph Stella and Gerhard Richter in his collection, the Belgian is addicted to the works of young experimental artists. The influential Servais is also an active presence on panels on collecting and business of art, and maintains a lively Twitter feed.
85. Yemisi Shyllon (Nigeria) NEW!
A 63-year-old Yoruba prince, Shyllon is the owner of a 7,000-piece art collection. According to CNN, it is the largest art collection in Africa. Shyllon’s private foundation, the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation, regularly sponsors international fellowships and workshops, and lends work to international museums. “It is a glorious obsession,” the Nigerian told the website Conceptual Fine Arts about his collecting. The prince is undoubtedly one of the major players in Africa’s current bull market.
86. Julia Stoschek (Germany)
In this publication, Stoscheck has been called both “a collector unafraid of contemporary, digital practices” and “Germany’s foremost post-Internet collector.” The focus of the Julia Stoschek Collection, which opened in 2007 in Dusseldorf, is video and time-based media art. Her 560-piece collection showcases both long-established artists like Bruce Nauman and newer talents like Ed Atkins, Josh Kline, and Cao Fei. Most recently, Stoschek launched a Berlin pop-up space to coincide with the 9th Berlin Biennale.
87. Budi Tek (Indonesia)
Known in some circles as the man who installed Random International’s Rain Room (2012) in his own private Yuz Museum in Shanghai (he also has a similarly named museum in Jakarta), these days Tek continues to be as busy as ever. Currently he is planning to build an Inhotim-type art-park in Bali, close to the Indonesian capital Denpasar. The planned museum will occupy five forested hectares and will display the sort of monumental works Tek favors, including Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War (2011–14), which consists of two huge vitrines containing rusting miniature submarines. “I am definitely making something very high end,” Tek told the Financial Times last year. “It will be quite expensive to go in, about $100, but once inside everything will be free.” He plans to open the park in 2017.
88. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani (Qatar) NEW!
Her excellency the Sheikha is the daughter of the former emir of Qatar and the sister of the country’s current emir, which probably makes her the most powerful woman in the art world—thanks to what CNN reports is a $1 billion annual purchasing budget. Acquisitions include major Warhols, Lichtensteins, Bacons, and Hirsts, as well as Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players (1895)—for which the Qataris paid $250 million (a record price for a work of art at the time)—and 11 Mark Rothko canvases, which cost a reported $310 million. The Jean Nouvel-designed National Museum of Qatar is reported to cost $34 million and is scheduled top open in 2016.
89. Steve Tisch (United States) NEW!
Movie producer and chairman of the NFL’s New York Giants, the billionaire Tisch has an outsize appetite for blue chip art that recently led him to build a 4,500 square foot private museum in his LA backyard. Among the works on view are Ed Ruscha’s large-scale painting A Blvd Called Sunset (1992) and Gerhard Richter’s gray-and-white Two Women at Table (1968). The producer of Forrest Gump is also a major contributor to LACMA and was instrumental in that museum’s purchase of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010).
90. Francesca von Habsburg (Austria)
Imperial archduchess Francesca von Habsburg is not merely haute European royalty (she is married to Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine). Her single-minded collecting has also garnered comparisons to America’s art-crazy heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Von Habsburg’s Vienna-based foundation, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, was founded in 2002. Since then it has developed a reputation as an incubator for socially minded art projects (exhibiting artists include Olafur Eliasson, Ernesto Neto, and Kutlug Ataman). TBA21 is planning a long-term “Oceans Pavilion” for Venice that von Habsburg hopes to launch during the summer of 2017 at the 57th international Venice Biennale.
91. Alice Walton (United States)
The richest woman in the world ($33.2 billion), Walton founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2011 to house a selection of masterpieces from her expanding collection. A museum spokesman tells artnet News that Walton, in her capacity as board chair, was recently involved in the following museum purchases: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (L.A.) (1991), Faith Ringgold’s Maya’s Quilt of Life (1989), and Alma Thomas’s Lunar Rendezvous-Circle of Flowers (1969). Additionally, Walton’s museum announced in March that it is planning to transform a defunct 63,000-square-foot Kraft cheese plant into a new space for contemporary art. The new museum is expected to open in 2018.
92. Derek and Christen Wilson (United States) NEW!
In 2014, the Wilsons gave a $1 million gift to the Nasher Museum at Duke, where Derek is a trustee. They followed up by donating several works of art and committing to the purchase of three others. Their own sprawling collection includes works by Christopher Wool, Sterling Ruby, Sol Lewitt, Joe Bradley, and Aaron Curry. Christen, meanwhile, sits on a dizzying number of arts associations: she’s co-chair of the North American Acquisitions Committee for the TATE Modern, chair of the Nasher Program Advisory Committee, member of the Soluna Advisory Panel Committee, member of the Whitney Performance Art Committee, and c0-chair of TATE Artists Dinner.
93. Robert and Nicky Wilson (United Kingdom)
Scottish collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson established Jupiter Artland, an award-winning sculpture park on the 100-acre estate outside Edinburgh which also includes the couple’s Jacobean manor home Bennington House. A charity, the park focuses on nurturing the work of contemporary artists and commissioning site-specific new projects. The sculpture collection is one of five nominees for this year’s Art Fund Prize £100,000 ($144,815), which awards a yearly honors to an UK art institution which has “shown exceptional imagination, innovation, and achievement.”
94. Elaine Wynn (United States)
Two years ago, the former wife of business partner of Las Vegas tycoon Steven A. Wynn was revealed by the New York Times to be the buyer of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), which she purchased for a staggering $142.4 million at Christie’s New York. According to the Los Angeles Times, Wynne recently pledged $50 million towards LACMA’s $600-million new building. Last year, she said that museum would be “prominently considered” as the recipient of her famed Bacon painting when she goes “to the craps game in the sky.”
95. Lu Xun (China)
Lu is the son of real-estate developer and Sifang Culture Group president Lu Jun, who made his fortune with real estate and cultural projects. In 2013, he opened the Sifang Art Museum outside of Nanjing. He continues to commission contemporary artists from around the world to create site-specific work for its premises.
96. Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei (China)
It was a big year for Liu and Wang, who followed up their 2014 purchase of a Chinese porcelain cup for $32 million by buying the world’s second-most-expensive painting at auction: Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu couché (1917), sold at Christie’s New York for $170.4 million. Liu has also made news for announcing plans to open a Chonqing outpost of his Long Museum, which already has two locations in Shanghai, and for acquiring shares of the Beijing Council International Auction Company. He also made waves this year at Art Basel for purchasing the mammoth Gerhard Richter canvas at Marian Goodman.
97. Anita and Poju Zabludowicz (United Kingdom)
Anita established herself as an adventurous collector well before founding three physical spaces in as many locations: north London, New York’s Times Square, and in Poju’s native Finland. The couple, with a 5,000-piece collection, completely eschews the current art-flipping phenomenon and is largely dedicated to supporting emerging artists. In 2014, Anita told the New York Times, “We prefer artists who like to work on long term projects with institutions. The get-rich quick painters are another story.” At this year’s Armory Show, George Vamvakidis of Athens’s Breeder Gallery told artnet News that the Zabludowicz Collection had bought Jannis Varelas‘s The Cowboy for $30,000.
98. Jochen Zeitz (South Africa)
The former chairman of the sportswear company Puma founded the Zeitz Collection in 2002; following that, the collection’s treasures were spread between spaces in the US, Kenya, Spain, Switzerland, and South Africa. In September 2017, all of that will change with the opening of the $38-million, 100,000-square-foot Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town. The museum’s director and curator, Mark Coetzee (formerly head of the Rubell collection in Miami), has put together what many consider to be the leading collection of contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora.
99. Qiao Zhibing (China)
Chinese entrepreneur and nightclub owner Qiao opened his namesake Qiao Space in September 2015. He has put on major solo shows there of the work of Wilhelm Sasnal and Cheng Ran, in addition to displaying his own collection. He recently told artnet News that he is planning to open a second Shanghai space in December 2017. Named Tank Shanghai, the complex will consist of plazas, gardens, a bookstore, an education center, restaurants, and more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. Among the artists in Qiao’s collection are Antony Gormley, Olafur Eliasson, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Houseago, Theaster Gates, Martin Creed, and Matt Saunders.
100. Jeremy Zimmer (United States) NEW!
The CEO of United Talent Agency has a collection of more than 250 works that he has spread throughout UTA’s company campus. His collection includes works by, among others, Walead Beshty, Tony Cragg, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Antony Gormley, Andreas Gursky, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and James Welling. But Zimmer’s newfound art-world influence rests on his agency’s recent representation of artists along with top-earning actors and celebrities. As Vulture put it last May, apropos of UTA’s incursion into art: “The Hollywoodification of the art world has begun.”