Tiffany Zabludowicz on being the daughter of billionaire art collectors

Tiffany Zabludowicz could have spent her life partying, but she's more focused on empowering female artists
Louis Wise28 February 2019

The first artwork Tiffany Zabludowicz acquired was a small drawing by Grayson Perry: she was given it for her bat mitzvah.

This tells us two things. First, that she has long been destined for her current occupation, as collector and curator. Second: it was a really, really nice bat mitzvah.

Zabludowicz is a strong enough name in the first place, but if you’re an art lover at least, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore. You should know it already thanks to the efforts of Tiffany’s parents, Poju and Anita, who are notable collectors themselves: it helps that they’re regularly ranked among the top 10 wealthiest couples in Britain, with a fortune of around £1.5 billion. Tiffany, now 26, is the second of their four children.

She has pretty much always been surrounded by their host of Chapmans, Emins and Hirsts, and for the past 10 years or so has been discreetly adding to it herself. We’re here then, at the Zabludowicz Collection gallery near Kentish Town, to discuss her new curated show, which features a mixture of established artists like Cindy Sherman and Isa Genzken, and edgy young Instagram-friendly ones like Chloe Wise and Signe Pierce. It looks properly credible, and has an enjoyably feminist edge. So collector, yes, curator, yes: one label she’s less keen on is ‘heiress’.

‘Heiress? Eugh! I mean, help,’ she says. ‘I’m not Paris Hilton!’ In fact she’s almost the anti-Paris — brunette and petite and discreetly dressed, mostly in black and a modish check blazer. The only thing they have in common is a soft nasal voice, but she is absolutely not Valley Girl — rather, her nice north London vowels have been moulded by years spent living in New York. Actually, maybe two things in common: Zabludowicz isn’t short of ambition either. Curating is her passion, she tells me, over a very civilised tea. ‘I feel like if I get really good at it, I can impact the field. And I really do wanna get very good at it. I want to become a master.’

 "If you’re pushing yourself to do things differently, you have to be open to the craziness of it"

Tiffany Zabludowicz

Let’s be honest: when you’re in line to inherit gazillions of pounds, you kind of are an heiress. But Zabludowicz does a pretty good job of pushing that to the bottom of her CV. ‘I’m not living a spoiled life,’ she promises. ‘I’m spending my time working really hard with artists who are the most down to earth people. I’m someone who’s willing to be packing up boxes of art for six hours. It just doesn’t quite fit with the term “heiress”, you know? But then,’ she sighs in her deadpan way, ‘I also don’t care. Whatever.’ And to be fair, the only time she sounds a bit one per cent is when she sighs about one of the main problems of being a young collector today. ‘I would like to be on a plane a bit less,’ she says sweetly. How often is that? ‘It varies, but sometimes too often.’ Is it your plane? ‘No, no, no,’ she laughs, ‘One hundred per cent not. Economy BA. But I am an airmiles holder, so that’s good.’

Zabludowicz’s show, World Receivers, does sound fun. It’s themed around ‘identity’, and since that’s a pretty mad and fragmented concept these days, it sounds pretty mad and fragmented, too. A portrait of the transgender actress Hari Nef, by Chloe Wise, will sit alongside works made of gel, or cowhide, or a tapestry that asks: ‘What would the mermaids think about Christopher Columbus?’. There is also a performance devised by someone called Puppies Puppies, inspired by the ‘existential plight’ of Olaf the Snowman of Frozen fame. Once a week, a performer will don an Olaf costume and dance until they collapse, exhausted. ‘A cacophony of very relevant but also quite entertainingly presented statements,’ is how Zabludowicz puts it. When she is helping pull all this together, does she ever think: this is a bit mad?

‘That’s what’s fun, is if it’s a bit mad. If you’re pushing yourself to do things differently, you have to be open to the craziness of it. I think that’s the point,’ she goes on. ‘It’s never work, it’s always playtime, which is amazing.’

It was Anita who first introduced her young daughter to art, dragging her around galleries as a child. Tiffany recalls being taken to see Michael Landy’s Break Down, in 2001, when the artist infamously pulverised everything he’d ever owned. It made quite an impression on the eight year old. ‘I remember watching his entire life’s possessions placed on a conveyor belt and systematically turned into sawdust,’ she smiles. ‘I was horrified, mildly. But also inspired by how wide-reaching art could be.’

Anita sounds like quite a force of nature herself, a Geordie who was working in Harrods when she met Poju in a Chelsea nightclub. When I suggest to Zabludowicz that maybe she collects the younger artists, and her mother the older ones, she quickly sets me straight. ‘It’s not quite so simple, because my mum’s so cool, and so on the pulse of my generation. She’s sometimes more millennial than me, which is a little... frightening. Like, “Mum, get off Instagram!”’

Zabludowicz stresses that her childhood was ‘normal’ (let’s assume it was as normal as they could make it). She got the bus every day to the local school, for instance, but that school was the prestigious all-girls Channing in Highgate. It’s clear that both parents, each gritty northerners of a sort (Poju is Finnish), wanted their kids to stay down to earth. ‘It’s upbringing, but it’s also a choice,’ says their eldest daughter. ‘You can choose to be a brat, or you can choose to be a productive human.’ Zabludowicz duly studied well at Channing, and then went to the prestigious Brown University, on the east coast of America, to pursue art history. After that she moved to New York, which is home, although both London and Finland are, too. Zabludowicz struggles to define the differences between London and New York (possibly because there are fewer and fewer, particularly at a globetrotting art market level). But she does think that London is more ‘experimental’, and offers a better quality of life.

What she is much more decisive on is the identity politics that have defined this decade. Trump’s shock election galvanised her, and she finds the art world’s lack of gender equality — still far fewer female artists represented by London galleries, still fewer female solo shows — ‘terrifying’. Her own show, in contrast, only has four males among its 16 artists, and it’s no coincidence, she admits.

‘I don’t understand why the [art] world hasn’t caught up with the movements that have been taking place,’ she says, ‘but maybe that takes time. My generation is very thoughtful. We’re more aware of issues like that; people are constantly checking themselves and contemplating the morality of their actions, because we have to. Because the world is at stake.’

Perhaps a better comparison than Paris Hilton is Peggy Guggenheim, though the obviousness of it would make Zabludowicz wince. Like Guggenheim, she comes from a phenomenally wealthy, prestigious Jewish family, and has a deep passion for her field. Unlike the naughty Guggenheim, she is ‘generally well behaved’, and being lined up to do something Guggenheim never quite nailed.

‘I mean, my mum just wants me to get married,’ she jokes — and then retracts — and then doesn’t. ‘She says that, but the minute I stop working, she goes nuts and pushes and pushes me. Which is amazing,’ she adds.

Whether she finds the right boy or not, you do sense she’ll stick to the art. She plans to keep curating, obviously, and she is tantalisingly vague as to whether she’d set up her own Guggenheim-style foundation. ‘Who knows what the future will bring?’ By the way, does what she buys end up in the family collection? ‘There’s no secret Tiffany store,’ she laughs. ‘Unless you’re talking about jewellery.’

World Receivers is at the Zabludowicz Collection from 21 Mar to 7 Jul (zabludowiczcollection.com)

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