Top 200 Collectors

Mato Perić is an entrepreneur who invests in various technology-focused companies, from Europe to India to Brazil to Singapore to the United Arab Emirates and beyond. Companies within the portfolio, which spans 35 countries, have collectively raised over $5 billion in capital. After studying business administration at the University of Hamburg, he completed his M.B.A. at the London Business School. He still splits his time between London and Hamburg, as well as Šibenik, Croatia, the country his family emigrated from to Germany in the 1970s.

As an art collector and patron, Perić has made sure to maintain those ties to Croatia, having supported the Croatian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Curated by Elena Filipović, the director and chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel, the exhibition presented a project by Tomo Savić-Gecan, but unlike a traditional national pavilion in Venice, this iteration did not have one physical location in the Floating City. Instead, the project infiltrated other national pavilions by way of readings of stories from international newspapers that had been compiled and generated by an AI algorithm. “The way the project speaks of our time about surveillance, the presence of the news media, the dissolution of national boundaries felt spot on,” Perić told ARTnews in an email interview. He’s also supported the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts.

On the collecting front, Perić has scooped up works by the likes of Cory Arcangel, Cosima von Bonin, Jana Euler, Jacqueline Humphries, Denzil Forrester, Louise Lawler, Tobias Spichtig, and the late Michel Majerus, who died in 2002 at age 35 in a plane crash. Majerus will be the subject of a major survey, his first in the United States, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, timed to open with the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach; Perić is lending the 15-panel painting overdose (1997) to the exhibition. His collection features a range of emerging artists, well-regarded mid-career artists, and an emphasis on “a trailblazing generation of female painters whose work continue to shift the paradigm around painting,” he said.

His collection focuses on what he calls “popular conceptual”: artists who “think responsively about art-making, using its history as a departure point for critical conversations about popular culture that can engage with the viewer on a multitude of levels,” he said, adding that he doesn’t see himself as “a collector that ‘caught the bug’ and because of this kept on adding works. Instead, with my first art acquisition I deliberately embarked on a journey, with the objective to create something meaningful that has a lasting positive impact, and collecting offers a wide range of options for having impact.”