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$10 million gift of contemporary art to gallery donated by Brigitte and Henning Freybe
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$10 million gift of contemporary art to gallery donated by Brigitte and Henning Freybe

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection will soon be richer with some 122 artworks valued at $10 million, courtesy of area collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe.

A remarkable roster of artists are represented, including Carl Andre, Nairy Baghramian, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Alicja Kwade, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Wolfgang Tillmans. The Freybes also focused on artists based in British Columbia such as Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Brian Jungen, and Jeff Wall, who are also represented in the gift. Their holdings span painting, printmaking, sculpture, film, photography, and installation.

The collection captures a number of periods and styles. There are Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse and Helen Pashgian, Arte Povera practitioner Giuseppe Penone, and Korean artist Lee Ufan, a major practitioner of the Mono-Ha movement.

“I had been told they were great collectors,” said Eva Respini, the museum’s deputy director and director of curatorial programs, in a phone call, as she recalled a breakfast party that the collectors threw to welcome her to the job when she moved there. “But that first visit just blew my away. I have the privilege of seeing many great collections, but it’s not often you see a collection of that quality. The Rauschenberg is the kind of thing you see in a museum, not a private home.

“The thing I took away is they really have given their lives to art,” she said. “It’s a modest-sized home and it’s like a gallery dedicated to the art. I was very impressed by their passion to collect art and to live with it. It’s not in storage, it’s not for investment.”

Henning Freybe is formerly the chairman of Freybe Gourmet Foods; Brigitte is a longtime supporter of the arts in Canada. In 2015, the pair founded Griffin Art Projects, a nonprofit Vancouver gallery and artists’ residency, partly to allow local collectors to show their work rather than guard it in their private residences. Brigitte Freybe co-founded the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver in 1972.

The pair started collecting in 1972, partly through dealer Doug Chrismas of Vancouver’s Ace Gallery, which did business with the legendary New York dealer Leo Castelli, giving the pair access to works by artists such as Rauschenberg, Stella, and Andy Warhol. (Chrismas would later move his gallery to Los Angeles.) Their first purchase was Stella’s earth-toned shaped canvas painting Piaski III (1973), from a group of works called the Polish Village paintings.

In an email, the couple noted that they added on to the mortgage of their home to support some budget-stretching purchases. They began traveling to Art Basel in the ‘80s, deepening their European connections, and after the turn of the millennium they developed relationships with New York galleries and their artists.

Some of the works not only challenged their financial resources but were also difficult to live with and maintain, they said.

“Very significant is Robert Rauschenberg’s Sea Cow Treaty (Spread) (1977), where a key element is two buckets of colored water (red and blue), that run continuously thanks to two hidden electrical pumps,” the pair explained in an email. “The problem is potential splashing water, requiring frequent cleaning of the filters on the faucets. Another piece is Wolfgang Laib’s Milk Stone, that requires milk to be placed on the stone, to bring about an intriguing shiny and reflective surface—the problem is that milk has a very short shelf life if not refrigerated.”

“We also have a piece by Pier Paolo Calzolari that has two large panels of blackened salt, with a cable running vertically between them—and that also has a compressor on the floor which when activated causes the cable to turn white with ice: the problem arises when the compressor is turned off, and the ice starts to melt,” they added.

“The word ‘transformative’ gets thrown about,” said Respini, “but in this case it really does apply, primarily because our mandate is to collect locally, nationally, and internationally. And on the international level, the bar has just gone up tremendously. This gift really will move the needle in terms of enlarging the stories we can tell.”


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