Elham and Tony Salamé with two works by Marc Quinn
Image credit: ARTnews
Tony and Elham Salamé are art collectors to watch, recently included in the annual Top 200 Collectors list. (You may have heard of his luxury retail empire, Aïshti, among Lebanon’s largest employers.) Salamé has amassed an extensive art collection, and will soon unveil a 40,000 square foot exhibition space for his Aïshti Foundation. For a city without a major contemporary art museum, the opening is hotly anticipated.
According to Salamé, art doesn’t know boundaries. With the Aïshti Foundation, Salamé is creating a space for a dialogue, a research facility, and a place to create works and projects about Lebanon. He plans to create personal suites for the artist to convey his or her own spirit through an installation of several works. The collection consists of 1,200 pieces of art, mainly abstract paintings, conceptual, Italian Arte Povera (Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Alberto Burri), and international talents: Glenn Ligon, Rudolf Stingel —and Lebanese artists, like Mona Hatoum and Walid Raad. While Salamé is currently managing his own collection, he is bringing in Massimiliano Gioni from the New Museum in NY, who also manages The Trussardi Foundation, to curate the inaugural exhibition. “His interest in art is really genuine, at times bordering on pure, great madness.”, says Gioni of Salamé’s passion.
The Aïshti Foundation funded “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol” when Deitch was at LA MOCA in 2012. This exhibition positioned Warhol as a major progenitor of today’s foremost riffs on abstractions, calling out the major shift from the hand of the artist (an inward view) to the popular, mass produced and impersonal nature of making (or, an outward view) and what has followed in terms of a new contemporary abstraction. 57 paintings and installations by 14 living artists (12 in NY and 2 in LA) are presented, including Tauba Auerbach, Mark Bradford, Wade Guyton, DAS INSTITUT, Urs Fischer, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Seth Price, Sterling Ruby, Josh Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Kelley Walker and Christopher Wool.
Above image: Sterling Ruby, SP181, 2011, spray paint on canvas, 145″ X 213″ X 2″. Ruby’s SP works are his exploration of aerosol and spray paint derived from his interest in gang tagging and urban demarcation in L.A., where he lives and works, as well as the joining of symbols, sacred and profane, that are not often seen together in the same space.
Installation view courtesy: Andrea Rosen Gallery
After creating the Aïshti Foundation in 2005, Salamé became even more committed to collecting contemporary artists in depth.
At Art Basel last month, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Galleria Franco Noero and Galerie Eva Presenhuber presented an installation by Sam Falls, Untitled (Books for Jamie), 2014 at Art Basel Unlimited. Consisting of a group of 24 dyed canvases ranging in color from yellow to black, the installation takes over 120 feet of wall space. It was reported that Salamé acquired these and plans to display at the new Aïshti Foundation building when it opens in October 2015.
Image courtesy of Art Basel
The Adjaye-designed Aïshti Foundation will be a 350,000 sq ft. hybrid building combining lifestyle, wellness and culture. The façade has a number of layers of louvered red-toned aluminum that creates an efficient shading system. The geometric ‘thunderbolt’ pattern of the louvres – or ‘baguettes’ – reappears in the landscaping across the entire site, as well as on the interior tiling, and becomes a defining motif.
Image courtesy of AF Asia
Salamé, in this 11 minute interview, shares that fashion designers often have a synergy with art, and as a result have excellent art collections. He points out the collections of Dino Facchini (Byblos), Fontana, Maramotti (Max Mara), Marc Jacobs, YSL, Pinault, Guess and Prada are all inspirations.
The above image is courtesy of Aishtiworld, his company’s Instagram page, featuring haute couture Spring/Summer 2013 from Maison Valentino
