SYDNEY: Hungarian-born Australian art patron John Kaldor on Thursday donated a collection of contemporary works valued at more than $30 million to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The collection brings together some 260 works by artists including Christo, Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Gilbert & George and Sol LeWitt.

“Built up over the past 50 years, the John Kaldor Collection represents the history of international contemporary art and is today valued at over 35 million Australian dollars (US$32m),” the gallery said.

Gallery director Edmund Capon called it “the most important collection of late 20th-century avant-garde art in Australia.” Kaldor, a successful businessman who immigrated with his family as a child in 1948, said the beginning of Pop Art in the early 1960s “opened my eyes to a totally new world, a world that I wanted to make my own.” “To collect was my way of participating in the excitement, in the creative energy of contemporary art,” he said.

“My home began to be filled with art. My children grew up with some very strange objects — for instance a 20 metre wrapped gum tree down the corridor by Christo which blocked a couple of bedrooms for about 10 years.

“It took some explanation for first time visitors that this was art.” Kaldor also began backing art projects, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of Little Bay in Sydney in 1969.—AFP