The Next-Gen Collectors: Gigi Surel

Cour Gigi Surel is the artworld’s answer to the 21st century multihyphenate: a curator, writer, patron and collector. I don’t recall what hat she was wearing when I met her – only that she has been a friendly face within the London art scene for years, both at the helm of her not-for-profit curatorial initiative, Teaspoon Projects, and at the gallery openings or museum receptions of the institutions she supports. 

Surel’s network might lead one to believe that she’s been at this for a long time or is a born-and-bred art insider. Her collection now spans around fifty works, she is on the patronage committees of organisations like Delfina Foundation and GoodEye Projects, and has just been profiled in the second volume of the Larry’s List ‘Next Gen Art Collector Report’. 

Yet Surel’s journey to art was self-initiated and borne from desires which might ostensibly seem at odds with the industry’s notorious exclusivity: belonging and conversation. In an air-conditioned Soho café on an impossibly hot London summer’s day, she tells The Art Journal what the new generation of collectors are doing differently. 

Surel grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, but was introduced to art history when she began travelling as a teenager. “I saw Picasso, Dalí – I was really interested in surrealism because that was the first movement I saw with my own eyes,” she tells me. “But I never thought that I could have a career in art. I went to law school in Turkey, but there was always something missing.” The issue wasn’t that Turkey didn’t have an arts ecosystem, Surel explains, but that she simply wasn’t aware of it.

When Surel moved to the US to do a master’s degree, she began to immerse herself in the artworld more consciously. “I researched ways to become more involved with the arts there and became a member at museums like the Met and MoMA. For $60 (£45) a year, you could get great access to members’ events.” From there, Surel joined an acquisitions committee at the Guggenheim, and it was at this point that she realised that art didn’t have to be an aside for her – it could be a full-time profession.

Courtesy Gigi Surel

It was also during this year – 2020 – that Surel acquired her first artwork: a painting of a unicorn escaping its gilded frame by Xu Yang, exhibited in the RCA degree show that Surel had discovered via Instagram. “I had just moved to London in December – it was dark and during the Covid pandemic… but there was so much hope in this painting.” Surel had moved to the UK to study Art Business at Sotheby’s, and – unable to find a job in art law – took a position at the (now closed) Simon Lee Gallery as an Artist Liaison. Though she no longer works in commercial galleries, she later also had a role at White Cube.

Surel is refreshingly open about her beginnings as a collector. “When I started collecting, it was in a very cautious way,” she tells me. “This was important, because at that time I was spending my family’s money. They’re not collectors, and so for them, the idea of spending a thousand pounds on a painting is ridiculous.” Eventually, as she gained professional experience in the art market, she became more confident about her own taste – a development which prompted not only increased acquisitions, but also curatorial experimentation.

This is something which Surel returns to throughout our interview: that there are myriad ways to support artists, and the new generation of collectors (defined by Larry’s List as under the age of 40) have a much less binary attitude to the act of acquiring work than their predecessors. “I think that some galleries are starting to realise this,” she says. “Those that will succeed are those who reach out to their collectors with more than just a priced PDF and a dinner invite.” What does ‘more’ look like? “It could be anything,” Surel responds, “even just a conversation. Sending a text message about an artist’s work without a price list immediately attached. Building a relationship.”

Surel is also open about the ways that social media has transformed collecting. Instagram has allowed collectors to discover artists and forge relationships independently, reducing the need for mediators. The result is somewhat surprising: more like the patron-artist relationships of centuries past than the speculative ideologies of more recent years. “In my experience, the next generation of collectors are more concerned with boosting an artist’s career actively than simply buying as an investment,” Surel says. “This is why I think galleries should be more open minded about how their network can help.”

Nowadays, Surel’s collection is mostly located in her West London apartment, with a few works sent back to Istanbul for storage (she is running out of space on her walls). There are no overt throughlines for the art she collects, except that she is drawn to pieces with strong emotional resonance or compelling narratives (Surel is also a voracious reader and often hosts literary nights and activations as part of Teaspoon Projects). Her favourite galleries are London’s hot newcomers: Final Hot Desert, Nicoletti, Ginny on Frederick, Copperfield Gallery and Rose Easton. She has purchased multiple works by the latter, such as a luminescent Eva Gold lightbox and a delicate painting of a Turkish tea glass by Tasneem Sarkez. 

Surel’s most recent acquisition is a Vytautas Kumža work – a champagne glass hung from a string – from Copperfield’s Liste booth, which was shown to her via a photograph while hanging out with the gallerists at Basel Social Club. Encounters like this, she suggests, motivate her much more than a mailing list email with an exhibition preview. I ask if Surel feels like galleries treat her differently as a curator because she also acquires work. “They don’t acknowledge me as a curator at all,” she responds. “Sometimes people don’t want to be vocal about being a collector because then the artworld can’t see you as anything else. It’s easy to be transactional. What I really wish is that more people spoke to each other as just people that love art. When that happens, that’s how magic occurs.”