Highlights of 20th-Century Art at Hauser & Wirth

Description

Sylvio Perlstein is one of the most important collectors of contemporary art. Raised in Rio de Janeiro, Perlstein has lived and traveled extensively between Brazil, Belgium, France, and the United States. Time and travel played fundamental roles in the evolution of his collection. He began in early adulthood to visit exhibitions, meet artists, exchange ideas with dealers and other collectors, and ultimately established a network of lifelong relationships that sustained an intimate, ever-growing understanding of artistic breakthroughs, revealed in a cache of hundreds of artworks in his holdings.

Perlstein credits his enthusiasm for collecting art to his time as a teenager in Rio de Janeiro, where, on a walk home from the beach, he persuaded a florist to sell him a painting that caught his eye in a flower shop. From that moment on, Perlstein recalled, he ‘never stopped seeking out art.’

In the late 1950s, Perlstein returned to Belgium, the country his family had fled to escape Nazism. There he began seeking out and purchasing work from local artists.

Over the course of more than five decades, the octogenarian has assembled a personal collection rooted in a passion for the work of pioneering artists. His collection traces the course of twentieth-century art, from Dada and Surrealism to Abstraction, Land Art, Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Pop Art, Op Art, Arte Povera, Nouveau Réalisme, and Contemporary Art.

A Luta Continua (‘the struggle continues’) is the first presentation of the Perlstein collection in Asia.  Spanning across two floors of Hauser & Wirth’s Hong Kong space in the H Queen’s building, the exhibition focuses on four main pillars of the Perlstein collection: Dada & Surrealism, vintage photography from the twentieth-century, Minimalism, and a compilation of contemporary artists Perlstein is deeply passionate about. Among these artists are Diane Arbus, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, René Magritte, Man Ray, Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, and Andy Warhol, to name but a few.