Why International Collectors Love London

A few years ago, Catherine Petitgas held a dinner at her Kensington home and offered guests a selection of human hands, feet and other more intimate organs for dessert. Created in ice cream (‘I had to follow a special recipe,’ says Petitgas), the body parts constitute Flora Treme, an artwork by the Argentinian art collective Opavivara, which comments on the theory that certain Brazilian tribes were once cannibals. ‘It’s very difficult to eat a mouth,’ says Petitgas, as she gleefully describes the event.

Opavivara are known for their entertaining interrogations of challenging themes and Petitgas is an enthusiastic collector of their and other artists’ performance pieces. ‘I love acquiring them,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s just an A4 piece of paper with instructions. It certainly gets around the issue of storage.’ She is not entirely serious, of course. As a collector, Petitgas is known for an approach to patronage that she herself has described as ‘militant’. ‘It’s important to buy things that aren’t necessarily pretty,’ she says. ‘It is one of my mantras to make contemporary and conceptual art more accessible. People are a bit frightened of it, so it’s important to demonstrate how it works.’

Petitgas, who is French, has been in London since 1995. ‘Both myself and my husband worked in finance,’ she says, ‘and at that point London was the place to be professionally.’ Once here, it was the city’s burgeoning art scene that got her attention. ‘I must have gone to “Sensation” more than seven times,’ she says of the definitive YBA exhibition that sent out shock waves from the Royal Academy in the summer of 1997. By 2000, she had completed an MA in art history at the Courtauld, and become a millennium guide for the about-to-be-unveiled Tate Modern. ‘The moment it opened,’ she says now, ‘it really raised the game.’

‘It’s important to buy things that aren’t necessarily pretty’ – Catherine Petitgas

Ralph Segreti, a Chicagoan whose collecting tends toward works by African-American and queer artists, and who settled permanently in London in 2006, agrees. ‘I was here briefly in 1998, and the Blair effect was happening, with culture being put right in the frame,’ he says, referring to the Labour prime minister sworn in in 1997. ‘But by 2006, you could feel the smaller institutions stepping up and the larger ones going global. London had really come into its own as an international city and the international diaspora had descended.’ 

Of course, times change. But although Segreti admits that Paris has been a beneficiary of Brexit, with some departures among the financial community, he says that he is still contacted all the time by those in Europe wanting to know what’s going on in London and planning repeated visits. ‘London is still London,’ he says. ‘The gallery nights, the collector base, the auction results, the kunsthalle-type exhibitions… Only New York can rival that.’ The figures bear this out. In 2022, according to the British Art Market Federation, New York still had the lion’s share of business, at 45% of global sales, with the UK in second place with 18% by value. ‘For an artist, having a London show is still a major thing,’ says Segreti. ‘It’s still London and New York.’

 

The city’s collecting scene is fuelled by both home-grown and foreign participants. Among the former are major players, like Muriel and Freddy Salem, whose Cranford Collection includes major works by Alice Neel, Frank Bowling, Albert Oehlen and Franz West. (Their Frieze dinner, in their David Chipperfield-designed Regent’s Park home, is one of the week’s hottest tickets.) There is Peter Simon, the fashion retailer, who initially looked way beyond Britain for his acquisitions (Alighiero + Boetti, Kim Sooja and Beatriz Milhazes were among his first purchases); the very discreet Palleys who have the absolute best of British – Piper, Auerbach, Armitage; or the younger Jack Kirkland who focuses on moving-image works as well as blue-chip pieces by Bridget Riley. This year, the Ampersand Foundation, which Kirkland co-founded, enabled the exhibition of Steve McQueen’s Resistance at the Turner Contemporary in Margate.

Among the second group is the Italian collector Nicoletta Fiorucci, who set up home in Chelsea in 2011. ‘I was specifically attracted by the art scene [in London],’ she explains. ‘There were so many not-for-profits, artist-led spaces, and artists and curators from everywhere. London’s diversity is its superpower. The minute I arrived, it changed the way I collected art completely. Italy is an open museum where we love – and live in – the past. London taught me to recognize quality in contemporary art and to look far and wide.’

‘For an artist, having a London show is still a major thing’ – Ralph Segreti

Fiorucci immediately established a trust, with curator Milovan Faronato, and enabled works by emerging and experimental artists. In 2022, the trust became the Fiorucci Foundation, which is concerned with supporting rather than originating projects. In 2022, for example, the Fiorucci Foundation gave significant backing to the Pollinator Pathway in Hyde Park by British-South African artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. The artwork – a 227-metre-long series of flower beds for which Ginsberg created the very best planting design to support the greatest possible number of pollinating creatures, thanks to a custom algorithm – is now in its second magnificent year. 

Segreti, who is on the North American Acquisitions Board for Tate, points out that where you live no longer necessarily dictates where you collect. ‘I’ve bought five pieces this year,’ he says. ‘One was a piece by Nikita Gale from a Detroit gallery, though I’d seen her work at Frieze in LA and at the Chisenhale in London in 2022. Another was from an international gallery which just happened to show something by Mark Bradford that I could afford at Zona Maco in Mexico.’ But the city does dictate how you think: ‘London shows are more curatorial and it’s a very freeing environment, with a lot of cultural cross-pollination.’

‘London’s diversity is its superpower. It changed the way I collected art completely’ – Nicoletta Fiorucci

Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre arrived in London in 2015, and set about establishing a group of her own. ‘I was already on the boards of the Palais de Tokyo and the Fondation Cartier’s Vivre en Couleurs in Paris,’ she explains. ‘And I wanted to set up something to connect London and Paris.’ Creating Spirit Now of London the following January, Clermont-Tonnerre assembled a cadre of 120 members – an international mix including those from Greece, Colombia and Iran. In 2022, Spirit Now brought four significant female artists to London from France, including Prune Noury and Valerie Bélin – who are markedly less known in the UK than at home. 

Last October, the Spirit Now’s Spirit of Giving fund acquired a work from Frieze – a painting by the African-American artist Sylvia Snowden – on behalf of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. This year, it plans on making another purchase at the fair, this time on behalf of the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield. ‘But next year,’ says Clermont-Tonnerre, ‘I would really like to take some British artists to Paris. That’s the objective.’

Petitgas has also found her work fuelled by her travels between institutions in different countries. She is a founding force of Fluxus, an Anglo-French art project, chair of the Tate International Council, a former trustee for nine years at the Whitechapel, chair of south London’s Gasworks (which supports emerging artists with studio space and mentorship), and part of the Latin American circle at the Guggenheim in New York since its inception in 2016. ‘I support the adjunct curator in that department too,’ she explains. She has imported the idea of the privately funded adjunct curator to both the Tate and the Pompidou and the necessity for a performance activation fund. ‘I insisted on creating a budget for performance enactment at the Guggenheim,’ she says, ‘and with the help of Frances Morris and Catherine Wood, we did the same at Tate.’

Petitgas’s own collection contains many Latin American artists, as well as celebrated works by women surrealists, but we have her to thank for the mesmerizing performance of Taiwanese Lee Mingwei’s Our Labyrinth in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last summer, where dancers swept delicate pathways into mounds of rice.

Beyond the big institutions, however, London’s multi-centred landscape keeps collectors on their toes. ‘My place is full in the daytime,’ says Fiorucci, who is staging a show of Paola Bey’s paintings at her Chelsea space during Frieze. ‘But everyone leaves in the evening to go south or east.’ Segreti – who has chosen to live in Bermondsey, a stone’s throw from White Cube’s flagship gallery – believes that this geographical diversity is part of the city’s intrinsic value and unique ecology. ‘Studio Voltaire in Clapham, or the South London Gallery in Camberwell, are small and need to connect to their local community, which becomes a strength,’ he says. Along with the other collectors, he cites Camden Arts Centre as another key driver in the city’s scene. 

Fiorucci also describes a recent visit to Whitechapel, where the artist Alvaro Barrington is setting up a campus of possibilities. ‘He’s bought a place that he is making into a studio, a school, a restaurant and a garden,’ she says. ‘It’s about creating a community and being local. It’s something to activate the area, which goes beyond the world of art.’

Petitgas finds herself more drawn to the south. ‘I love what Margot Heller has done at South London Gallery,’ she says. ‘I supported the Oscar Murillo garden there. And I love going to Peckham to see Hannah Barry and the  Centre for Contemporary Art run by Sarah McCrory – she represents a very particular edgy experimental aesthetic.’

But often, Petitgas has them come to her. ‘Sin Wai Kin – formerly known as Victoria Sin – who has a studio at Gasworks, did a performance in my house,’ she says. ‘They transformed my sitting room into a swimming pool with projected blue light, and read a rather fabulous, rather pornographic text.’ In June this year, Sin Wai Kin received the prestigious Prix Baloise at Art Basel. A seasoned London collector, Petitgas knows how to spot a winner.  

_{Main Image: Performance Photography of Our Labyrinth at Tate Modern, 2022. Photo © Tate (Oliver Cowling). Performance supported by Catherine Petitgas}