Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, among the most significant contemporary art collectors in Britain, will next month offer approximately 100 works from their 5,000-strong family collection at Christie’s London, which the auction house bills as the highlight of its summer season. With an estimated total of nearly £20 million, the sale marks the first time any portion of the Zabludowicz collection has come to public auction, and it arrives at a moment that is equal parts personal transition and art-market event.
The collection, formalised in 1994, has been one of the defining private accumulations of British contemporary art over the past three decades. Anita Zabludowicz, who received an OBE for services to the arts in 2015, served as a trustee of the Camden Arts Centre for fifteen years and was a founding benefactor of Tate Modern when it opened in 2000. Between 2007 and 2025, the family ran their own non-profit exhibition space in a converted chapel in Camden, providing a platform for cutting-edge work by artists who had not yet found institutional support. Their influence on the ecology of the British art world, particularly Anita’s, has been substantial and widely acknowledged.
Since 2014, however, the couple has faced undue criticism, campaigns and artist-led protests focused on their family wealth’s origins in the Israeli and Finnish defence company Soltam Systems, built by Poju’s late father, a Polish Holocaust survivor. The company was sold in 1991. A family spokesperson has stated that Tamares Group, the private equity firm through which the family’s current interests are managed, holds no investments in the West Bank or in military-related activities, with the majority of its portfolio concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom and Finland across real estate, hospitality, technology and private equity.
The sale is considered a recalibration, a marking of the transition, with primary responsibility for the collection passing to the couple’s children, currently led by their daughter, Tiffany.
The top lot is Philip Guston’s Mirror Head from 1977, a panoramic canvas depicting the back of his wife’s dark-red head against an expanse of blue, estimated at £3.5 million to £5.5 million. The work is among the most significant pictures in a sale that also includes Damien Hirst’s I Love You from 1994 to 1995, one of the artist’s first butterfly paintings, estimated between £600,000 and £800,000, and Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud XXXIII from 2000, estimated between £300,000 and £500,000. Tiffany Zabludowicz describes the Gormley as having functioned as an impressive Christmas tree in the family home, a detail that humanises the institutional scale of the collection it comes from.
Yoshitomo Nara’s large white sculpture, Your Dog, from 2002, estimated at £550,000-£850,000, carries its own domestic history. Anita recalls encountering it at Art Basel Miami Beach and immediately putting her arms around it, an instinctive response to an object that has since become a family favourite. Henry Taylor’s Untitled (jade in white) from 2012, a bold portrait of the artist’s daughter, is estimated at £120,000-£180,000 and represents the personally significant work that gives a long-form collection sale its texture beyond the headline lots.
Francisca Haya, Christie’s managing director for EMEA, noted that the works represent important moments in the careers of celebrated artists and continue Christie’s strong demand for museum-quality material of this calibre.
The generational transition the sale marks is embodied most clearly in Tiffany Zabludowicz, who holds a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute and has since expanded the collection in her own directions, bringing in digital practitioners including Jon Rafman and performance artist Puppies Puppies alongside ceramics acquired with her first small collecting budget at the age of sixteen. She now runs the family’s New York operation, Times Square Space, a residency and exhibition venue established in vacant offices. She articulates a philosophy of collection-building that emphasises platform provision and residency support over pure acquisition. Studio costs, she notes, are making it increasingly difficult for artists to work in both London and New York, and residency programmes represent a meaningful response to that pressure.
The family has also deepened its commissioning programme on the Finnish island of Sarvisalo, where works, including Matthew Day Jackson’s 2012 underground bronze skeletal sculpture Hauta, have been sited. Nearly forty works have been donated to national collections to date, with further donations planned in consultation with advisors who identify appropriate moments in each artist’s career.
Anita’s account of her own evolution as a collector traces a familiar arc from personal pleasure to institutional responsibility. What began as putting pictures on walls became about sharing, then about providing platforms, and finally about understanding when purchase is not the most useful form of support. Whether the market embraces the Christie’s sale with the enthusiasm the collection’s significance deserves is one question. What the sale represents beyond its commercial outcome, the closing of a chapter in British collecting that shaped the contemporary art scene for thirty years, is a rather more substantial one.
Top Photo: © Artlyst 2025
The Zabludowicz Collection sale is at Christie’s London. Further details at christies.com.