Zabludowicz Collection to Bring £15 Million to Christie’s London Sale
Anita and Poju Zabludowicz are sending 106 works to Christie’s next month in a sale expected to total £15 million, or $20.1 million, as the couple continues to reshape how their collection is seen and circulated. The auction will take place in London on June 25, with additional works offered in an online sale.
The headline lot is Philip Guston’s *Mirror Head* (1977), which carries a high estimate of £5.5 million, or $7.38 million. The sale also includes works by Beatriz Milhazes, Rose Wylie, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, Henry Taylor, and Charline von Heyl, signaling a broad sweep across postwar and contemporary practice.
The Zabludowiczes have long been among Europe’s most visible collectors, but their public profile has shifted in recent years. They closed their private museum in London in 2023 after more than 15 years, saying at the time that the institution would continue through a permanent space on the Finnish island of Sarvisalo and that its main emphasis would be lending rather than fixed display.
That closure came amid sustained criticism over the couple’s alleged ties, through the Tamares Group, to a pro-Israel lobbying group and military aircraft services company. The controversy had already been building before Israel’s war in Gaza began in late 2023. In 2021, a group of artists “deauthorized” works held by the couple in protest of what they described as the collectors’ involvement in “Israeli-state-led apartheid.”
The pressure intensified in 2023, when Finnish artists boycotted Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, which had previously received support from the Zabludowiczes and later cut ties with them. Later that year, the collectors publicly addressed Israel and Palestine for the first time, writing, “We passionately support a Two-State Solution that guarantees the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live and work side-by-side in peace,” and denouncing “innocent lives lost on both sides.”
In a statement to the Financial Times on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the family said that “most” of Tamares Group’s investments are in the USA, UK, and Finland, with a small percentage in Israel, and that the firm has no investment in the West Bank or military-related interests. Christie’s declined to comment on the controversy, which was not mentioned in its sale announcement.
For Christie’s, the auction places a major private collection back into circulation at a moment when the market for blue-chip contemporary art remains selective. For the Zabludowiczes, it marks another turn in a collecting story that now extends beyond acquisition and display to questions of legacy, access, and public scrutiny.
