“It was a way of helping to open this country to the world,” says Nimfa Bisbe, the chief curator of the “la Caixa” Foundation. “La Caixa was one of the first institutions to bring art from outside Spain into the country.”
Artists including Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Donald Judd formed the basis of the collection. “We bought [art market star] Gerhard Richter in the 1980s—not so bad, right?” Bisbe says.
How the Art Is Acquired
Today, most banks purchase art exclusively on the primary market—that is, from galleries or the artists themselves.
“The way we’ve approached collecting has been anchored in living artists,” says Corrie Jackson, the senior curator of the art collection of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Specifically, she continues, the bank collects Canadian artists. “We’re looking at reflecting on, ‘What are the voices of the moment we’re in?’ ”
Similarly, “during my tenure, we have not bought anything on the secondary market and never at auction,” says UBS’s Rozell, referring to works that have been bought once before.
“The mission is to support artists and the gallery system that supports artists,” she says. Most of UBS’s collecting practice “is about the communities where we do business, and we want to support those communities.”
Banks don’t publicly disclose their annual acquisition budget, nor do curators divulge how many works they buy every year.
That’s partially, Rozell says, because “it changes depending on the project we have. We have a flagship office in Singapore that’s going to open later this year, and we commissioned a work by Danh Vo. But if it’s a smaller project, you might be buying more prints, so it pushes the numbers up.”
The only thing she can say definitely is that “we’re consistently active.” In terms of price, Rozell continues, “it’s not very common we’re going over $250,000 [per piece], that’s definitely more the exception.”
How the Art Is Shown
Every bank hangs its art collection in its offices. Beyond that, each company’s exhibition practices diverge. Some banks have dedicated exhibition spaces, like Deutsche Bank AG’s Palais Populaire in Berlin.