The legendary artwork collector, patron and impresario, Sylvio Perlstein, died on Wednesday.
Hauser & Wirth confirmed the news with a post on Instagram, calling Perlstein “a visionary collector who formed one of the crucial necessary artwork collections of the previous century”.
In 2018, Hauser & Wirth’s areas in Chelsea and Hong Kong exhibited 380 items from the Perlstein assortment for ‘A Luta Continua. The Sylvio Perlstein Collection‘, highlighting his “daring, intuitive method to gathering and his shut ties with artists”.
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Hauser & Wirth additionally famous in its Instagram submit that Perlstein as soon as mentioned: “I really feel keen about issues that unsettle me, that intrigue me, make me uncomfortable.”
The exhibition was the subject of a feature in the New York Times, which famous its expansive inclusion of “Dada and Surrealism (Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle); American minimalism and post-minimalism (Donald Judd, Advert Reinhardt, Brice Marden, Fred Sandback); and land artwork (Richard Lengthy, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark)”.
Perlstein was born in Belgium within the Thirties, till his household fled from the Nazis to Brazil in 1939. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro, the place he modified his title from Sylvain to Sylvio and bought his first paintings as an adolescent. Later, he joined his household’s diamond enterprise in Antwerp, the place he ultimately took over its diamond-cutting agency.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Perlstein made many journeys to New York to chop and polish tough diamonds for the well-known jeweler Harry Winston. Whereas there, he met many artists at Max’s Kansas Metropolis, earlier than recieving invites for studio visits and presents to recieve or commerce artworks.
Perlstein’s expertise throughout two very completely different international locations was mirrored within the works by Belgium modernists Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers, Pol Bury, and Leo Dohmen in addition to Brazilian artists Ernesto Neto, Vik Muniz, Miguel Rio Branco, Marepe.
Perlstein first met Man Ray at a gallery in Vence, within the south of France, in 1969, that was exhibiting the American artist’s drawings, gouaches and watercolors, and instantly purchased a number of works. Their friendship continued till the artist’s loss of life in 1976. Perlstein acquired many “rayographs” and iconic pictures, “similar to a girl’s naked again adorned with the f-holes of a violin”.
Perlstein’s assortment additionally included many early works from artists, together with Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein and Brice Marden from the mid-60s, and items by Keith Haring, together with the oil on canvas portray Mickey Mouse (1981) “with a sexually suggestive snout”.
An curiosity in neon lightbulbs prolonged to acquisitions of works by Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Keith Sonnier, Martial Raysse and Jason Rhoades. Specifically, lots of the works by Nauman included puns and wordplay, just like the sculpture None Sing Neon Signal (1970).
Perlstein, in keeping with the Occasions, had “a curiously massive variety of works that characteristic ladies’s hair (or hair look-alikes), by such artists as Tunga, Pierre Boucher, Harry Callahan, Magritte and Maar.” Lubow described the {photograph} Publicité pour Pétrole Hahn (1935) of “a three-sailed ship in a sea of hair” by Maar as “memorably unusual” and consistent with Perlstein’s devotion to Surrealism.
And, whereas many collectors hoard artworks in storage, Perlstein notably saved “100 black-and-white pictures by Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Invoice Brandt, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy” displayed on the partitions of an oval room in his Paris dwelling, in addition to drawings by Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, On Kawara and Agnes Martin.
“The home is a recent model of Ali Baba’s cave,” cultural critic Arthur Lubow wrote for the Occasions.
