The Chouraqui Collection

Message from the Collector:

The Chouraqui Collection grew from a simple conviction: that the great visual languages of the last century are not sealed in separate rooms. Abstraction in Paris after the war, the sign and the brush in China and Taiwan, the raw energy of CoBrA, the lyricism of Israeli modernism, and the late afterlives of Cubism and Surrealism all speak to one another if one is willing to listen across borders.

I never set out to build a survey of “movements.” I looked for works in which an artist had found a personal temperature — a way of putting colour, matter, or form under pressure until something irreducible appeared. That is why a 1961 casein painting by Carla Accardi can sit, in the mind, beside Chu Teh-Chun’s atmospheric oils, Zao Wou-Ki’s dated canvases, a Hartung from the 1950s or the 1980s, Soulages working in walnut stain, or Gao Xingjian’s ink landscapes that are neither fully landscape nor fully abstraction. The same instinct led me to CoBrA — Appel, Jorn, Atlan, Pedersen, Wolvecamp — and to the School of Paris in its most serious register: Poliakoff, Lanskoy, Schneider, Mathieu, Riopelle, de Staël, Vieira da Silva, Debré.

Sculpture has always been part of the same conversation. Agustín Cárdenas’s bronzes, Ju Ming’s Tai Chi figures, Philippe Hiquily’s metal women and weather vanes, Chui Faising’s measured marble and bronze, Grisha Bruskin’s painted bronze couple, Ossip Zadkine’s Adolescent, Joseph Erhardy’s standing figure — these are not decorations around the paintings. They hold space the way a good painting holds time.

Israel is not a side chapter. Michael Argov, Marcel Janco, Naftali Bezem, Lea Nikel, Igael Tumarkin, Meir Pichhadze, Zahava Lupo, Arik Levy: artists who carried European modernism into another climate and made it their own. China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are equally central — Chuang Che, Chu Ko, Ha Bik Chuen, Lan Zhenghui, Wei Ligang, Wang Chuan, Wang Yan Cheng, Yang Jiechang, Shi Hu, Walasse Ting — artists for whom ink, oil, and gesture are not opposing camps but a single inheritance rewritten.

There are earlier modernists here because the century does not begin in 1945: Metzinger and Lhote, Magnelli, Hélion, Survage, Hofmann, Masson, Brauner, Lam, Matta, Clavé. And there are later voices — Scully, Förg, Paladino, Motherwell’s late collage, Hoda Kashiha — because a living collection should not freeze at a convenient date.

I acquired works from galleries I trust and from the auction rooms of Paris, London, New York, and Hong Kong, and occasionally close to the studio. Provenance in this house is a trail of looking, not a trophy list.

The collection is private. It exists to be lived with, studied, and, in time, shared with those who care about how images travel — from Trapani to Taipei, from Copenhagen to Tel Aviv, from Rodez to Beijing — and still remain exact.

Andre Chouraqui