COURTESY CURIATOR
The Swiss conglomerate MCH Group announced today that it has acquired Curiator, a digital platform that allows users to share and collect images of art. A news release notes that Curiator will remain a standalone effort.
MCH Group has, until now, devoted most of its energy toward buying and overseeing art fairs. It is notably the parent company of all three Art Basel fairs, in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong, though MCH Group also owns smaller fairs like Design Miami. In March, MCH Group announced that it was developing “a new portfolio of leading regional art fairs,” in an effort to increase its international presence.
Curiator was launched in 2014 by Moenen Erbuer and Tobias Boonstoppel. The digital platform’s Pinterest-like interface currently allows users to upload and share pictures of artworks, which are then displayed on the website as curated collections. While Curiator currently does not sell any art, Erbuer and Boonstoppel have said in interviews that the site is designed to help users find art they might want to buy.
“We are absolutely thrilled about combining our expertise with the power of MCH Group,” Erbuer said in a statement. Boonstoppel added, “The projects we are working on are important regarding the MCH’s overall strategic directions of internationalization and digitalization.”