Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, two art collectors who regularly appear on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, are set to sell £15 million ($20.1 million) at Christie’s next month via an in-person auction in London on June 25 and an online sale.
The top lot of the 106 works headed to auction is a Philip Guston painting. Titled Mirror Head (1977), it comes to sale with a high estimate of £5.5 million ($7.38 million). Also headed to auction are works by Beatriz Milhazes, Rose Wylie, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, Henry Taylor, and Charline von Heyl.
Once one of the most visible collecting couples in Europe, the Zabludowiczes appear to have in recent years scaled back some of their operations, closing their private museum in London in 2023 after more than a decade and a half in operation. The museum said at the time that it would continue to run a permanent space on the Finnish island of Sarvisalo, and that the main focus was to loan out works rather than to show them at fixed locations.
The museum shuttered as the Zabludowiczes continued to face pushback over their alleged ties to a pro-Israel lobbying group and military aircraft services company via the Tamares Group, a private equity firm where Poju Zabludowicz serves as chair and CEO. The controversy had already been brewing before Israel’s war in Gaza began in late 2023, with a range of artists “deauthoring” works held by the couple in 2021 in protest of what they described as the collectors’ involvement in “Israeli-state-led apartheid.”
But in 2023, the dissent grew louder, leading a group of Finnish artists to boycott Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, which had previously received money from the Zabludowiczes and which subsequently cut ties with the collectors. Then, later in the year, the Zabludowiczes publicly addressed Israel and Palestine for the first time.
“We passionately support a Two-State Solution that guarantees the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live and work side-by-side in peace,” the collectors wrote, denouncing what they described as “innocent lives lost on both sides.”
In a statement to the Financial Times Wednesday, a spokesperson for the family said that “most” of the Tamares Group’s investments “are in the USA, UK and Finland, with a small percentage in Israel,” and that the firm has “no investment in the West Bank or military-related interests.” A Christie’s spokesperson declined to comment to the Financial Times on the controversy, which was not mentioned in the house’s release.
In that release, Anita Zabludowicz said in a statement, “I feel incredibly proud to have arrived at this moment, where we can truly open up and share the collection with those who wish to continue its journey, giving other collectors and museums the opportunity to offer some of these works a new home and a new life. Art has no beginning and no ending — it is a story that continuously evolves. That is how I see the future: Then, Now, Next.”