Nicolai Frahm: The Super Collector

Takashi Murakami Kitagawa – Kun

Uniquely colored sculpture, oil paint, synthetic resins, fiberglass and stell

Background: Richard Prince, Telling It Over. Signed, titled and dated 1989 on the overlap acrylic
and silkscreen on canvas

“I bought my first Murakami painting in 1997, and he is an artist that I’ve loved every single day since then.”

Nicolai Frahm

Last month, I attended the premier of Wanderlust at Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery, and saw a curated show unlike any other that I’ve seen before. Nicolai Frahn (famously known as the ‘Super Collector’) was the man responsible for an exhibition filled with a range of art that can best be described as “minimal, clean, Zen” to “very pop, figurative, in-your face.” So it became important for me to understand the collection by looking into the background of the collector.

INTERNATIONALISM AT ITS BEST

Nicolai Frahm is an influential art collector, patron of the arts, and art advisor. I understand that in February 2013, he will be opening a nonprofit art center with collector Frank Cohen in central London. The center will highlight both collaborators’ keen eye for progressive art, and will also include commissioned works by some of the selected artists that you see here. Sotheby’s Lisa Dennison describes Wanderlust as a ‘journey around the globe as seen through Nicolai’s eyes. His aesthetic is broad enough to accommodate the divergent paths of much of today’s art”. I agree. But for me, it was also a splendid journey of exceptional examples of contemporary art from various artists who managed to survived the Cultural Revolution, and came out to create something beautiful, and extraordinary: art that will surely stand the test of time.