Stories We Live With. Meet the collectors Katalin Spengler and Zsolt Somlói

About the event:

The meeting will be held as part of the series Collecting: Anatomy of Passion.

Join us for a meeting with Katalin Spengler and Zsolt Somlói, distinguished collectors from Hungary who have been promoting contemporary art from Eastern Europe on the international stage for many years.

Katalin Spengler and Zsolt Somlói have been collecting art since the early 1990s, when the Iron Curtain came down. Katalin Spengler, a journalist and art critic by training, and Zsolt Somlói, head of a renowned media agency, have built up an extensive collection of contemporary art from the region and other parts of the world. They sit on the advisory boards of Tate Modern (REEAC) and Centre Pompidou (IC–CEE), advising on Central and Eastern European art and raising the profile of artists from the region.

Tickets cost 5 PLN and can be purchased online >> or in the ticket office.

On the series Collecting: The Anatomy of a Passion

This is the first of the series of discussions with prominent collectors of contemporary art – individuals who not only collect works of art, but also shape the culture of patronage and support artistic institutions.

Adam Budak, director of MOCAK and curator of the series, says: ‘We will be launching a new series of events, meeting with and talking to prominent collectors of contemporary art from around the world. Listening to such extraordinary personalities and learning about the philosophy behind their passion for collecting art is not only a pleasure but also an emancipatory moment – inspiring the culture of collecting, it continues the centuries-old tradition of supporting artists and institutions. This topic has been close to my heart for a long time. At the National Gallery in Prague, I curated the exhibition Generosity: The Art of Giving, dedicated to patrons who have helped shape the identity of the Czech national collection over the years. This project threw a spotlight on the tremendous value of acts of generosity and their fundamental role in the development of artistic structures, both private and institutional.’

 

 

We wanted to change everything, including the practices of art collecting. We bought works by young artists who were in tune with the times, and we wanted to discover the international art scene as well, which was not an easy undertaking at the turn of the millennium, starting out from Eastern Europe. We bought artworks from galleries in Britain, Germany, France, Austria and New York, but we also built relationships with the most important galleries in the Eastern Europe region.

 

Analysing the logic of collections and collecting, Boris Groys aptly noted in the introduction to his book titled Logic of the Collection that ‘a collection is always a collection of differences among the similar’. The collector acquires an increasing number of objects, creating thus a complex system of differences; however, these objects are also connected in some way. This might be a manifestation of the collector’s subjective point of view and personal taste, but it may also be a principle defined by a more complex set of concepts. The best and most exciting collections are characterised by such dichotomies and the fruitful tension that arises from them: they reveal diversity in unity and an impulsive, self-conscious subjectivity within the conceptualised framework of collection-building.

 

Dávid Fehér, Horizons, Dialogs, Narratives, in: Stories We Live With. Selection from Somlói-Spengler Collection, Somlói Zsolt–Spengler Katalin: Q Contemporary, Budapest, 2022, p. 13.

 

 

Join us for the forthcoming event in the series:

• 11 November 2025, 6 pm – meet the collectors Teresa and Andrzej Starmach >>

 

Zsolt Somlói and Katalin Spengler