How Does a Super-Collector Shop at Frieze London? We Tagged Along With Jupiter Artland Patron Nicky Wilson

Nicky Wilson’s ambitions for art are nothing if not giant-sized.
In person, however, she is so down to earth that few would realize
that she is one half of a power couple running the vast open-air
museum known as Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh.

For the past decade, the Wilsons have been commissioning leading
artists to create site-specific works on the grounds of their home,
which is open to the public from spring to autumn, and strives to
welcome every school child in Scotland. They even host their own
summer music festival, Jupiter Rising.

When collectors are at that level—the Wilsons have their very
own, fabulous Joana Vasconcelos swimming pool in their backyard,
unveiled this summer—what on earth might they want at Frieze
London? artnet News spent a happy few hours visiting the fair with
Wilson to find out.

A Wild One

“Art has got to hit me in the solar plexus,” Wilson says, as we
arrived at our first booth.

It is a Scottish gallery, naturally: Glasgow’s Herald St. “I’ve
got to support Scotland,” she declares. Pablo Bronstein’s Panic
Button in Russian Style (2019) catches her eye, so much so
that we go looking in the gallery’s backroom for more Bronstein.
“There is always something in the gallery’s backroom,” she
says.

The Wilsons know the Argentina-born artist well. They
commissioned his splendid Rose Walk for
Jupiter Artland, a delicate Gothic-meets-Chinoiserie structure that
houses an actual rose garden.

The Wilsons want the artists they chose for their park to create
not necessarily their biggest work, but rather help them create one
of their best works. Those who also risen to the occasion
include Charles Jencks, Andy Goldsworthy, Cornelia Parker, and Jim
Lambie, as well as a host of artists lesser known on the
international stage, such as Tania Kovacs, Laura Ford, Nathan
Coley, and Peter Liversidge, showing their independent streak.

Jupiter Artland’s highlights also include Phyllida Barlow’s
first permanent outdoor work, a craggy, monumental tower that is as
tall as the highest tree in the sculpture park’s woodlands. Barlow
taught Nicky Wilson when she was an art student at Camberwell
College in South London. The artist says Wilson was “a wild
one.”

A Constant Champion

Mid morning we bump into another of Wilson’s friends, also a
former tutor: the artist Cornelia Parker. She has two works at
Jupiter Artland.

The impromptu gathering is quite a reunion. We’re at the booth
of Edinburgh gallery Ingleby, and gallerists Richard and Florence
Ingleby have known the Wilsons since they arrived in Edinburgh 20
years ago. There is much talk of children, A-level results, an
offspring’s first job in the art world, and so on.

At the Ingleby booth, the Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan’s new
painted collages are an instant subject of conversation between
gallerists and collector. One new work in particular, showing a
mother and child, titled Tear 54 (2019) and priced at
£3,500 (£4,300), impresses Wilson partly because it signals a
change in the artist’s work, which she knows well.

Indeed, Wilson reveals that Flannigan, who seems to be enjoying
a happy mid-career, has already painted her portrait—albeit in a
startling way. “I am shown breastfeeding a donkey,” she says,
raising her eyebrows.

The symbolism may be opaque, but the anecdote conveys Wilson’s
sense of humor and love of colorful, off-the-wall art—and her
longstanding support of female artists.

As art museum directors and their trustees on both sides of the
Atlantic talk about about tackling gender bias, the Wilsons have
been walking the walk for years. The sculptor Laura Ford,
whose work was on show at Frieze Sculpture last year, says they
backed her to the hilt when she proposed a series of “Weeping Girls” for Jupiter
Artland. Ford’s melancholic figures seem like lost souls in the
woods.

“We were mainly British but as we are opening up to more
international artists,” Wilson explains. “What remains the same is
our interest in women.”

The Italian artist Lara Favaretto is a case in point. She has
works in Ralph Rugoff’s main exhibition at this year’s Venice
Biennale, which Wilson has come from seeing. At Frieze,
Favaretto’s swirling sculpture made from carwash brushes catch
Wilson’s eye at Turin’s Franco Noero.

“There is something mesmeric about them,” Wilson says. She is
interested in the ideas behind the work, TABOO
(2017), as well as practical details: “Do you get replacement
brushes?” A gallerist explains that you do, and the two browse the
artist’s similar works on an iPad.

Thinking of Home

Frieze seems to be for browsing not snapping up works. Still,
Nicky and Robert Wilson usually buy something at Frieze, typically
for their “private” collection of indoor pieces for their home at
the heart of Jupiter Artland.

Hence her interest in Bronstein’s new work, or another artist
whose work they already own, the increasingly in-demand Zanele
Muholi. A striking new photographic self-portrait of the South
African catches Wilson’s eye on the booth of Stevenson of Cape Town
and Johannesburg. (Prices from $9,000.)

At the same time, art fairs can be the start of a conversation
that pays off later, Wilson says. Later in the day, after we part,
she is due to meet one of the doyennes of the London art scene,
dealer Maureen Paley, to talk about possible major commission. When
it comes to initiating a new major commission, “gallerists usually
just say ‘get on with it,’” Wilson says.

Many of the artists that they have selected over the years are
now friends of the Wilson family. These include the hot-as-Hades Swiss
artist Nicolas Party, who has just joined the roster of Hauser &
Wirth. The New York- and Brussels-based artist designed Café
Party at Jupiter Artland. Unveiled in 2017, the Wilsons joke
they would be unable to afford it now given the way that his prices
have skyrocketed.

We checked out Party’s new sculptures of a giant head (at Xavier
Hufkens of Brussels) and reclining body (at Modern Institute,
Glasgow), both of which are the subject of much collector and
institutional interest. I wondered how Wilson felt about
collector-investors clamoring to jump on the Party bandwagon.

“His market value is irrelevant,” she says. “I am really pleased
at his good fortune. He is more than capable of coping.”

Even amid the glamorous frenzy of Frieze, Wilson’s thoughts are
never far from home, in particular because she has spent the past
three weeks in Venice visiting the biennale along with her small
dog, Daphne. “She went everywhere. We were normalized,” she
says.

In fact, her thoughts were already turning to the weather back
home. “There is a storm coming,” she says, eyeing the weather in
Scotland. As Frieze gets into full swing down south, Jupiter
Artland is going into winter hibernation: Vasconcelos’s funky pool
needs draining, Marc Quinn’s sculpture needs protecting, and no
doubt a hundred other things need sorting.

The post How Does a Super-Collector Shop at Frieze London?
We Tagged Along With Jupiter Artland Patron Nicky Wilson
appeared first on artnet News.