"I prefer to buy the best from the best, than the worst from the best"- Eugenio López Alonso

Mexican fruit-juice heir Eugenio López Alonso has come to fame by amassing what has been defined the largest collection of contemporary art in Latin America. Including works by local as well as American and European masters, Eugenio López’s collection offers a glimpse into the life of a collector of international stature and whose pioneering vision has contributed to launch him as one of the key players of the global arena of contemporary art.

Eugenio López Alonso in his Los Angeles mansion filled with artworks by different contemporary art masters. Courtesy of Eugenio López Alonso.

Eugenio López began collecting in the late 1990s, when he acquired a reputation as perhaps the most important contemporary art collector in Latin America. Armed with curiosity and guided by savvy advisors, year after year he purchased important pieces by the likes of Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Nancy Rubins, Francis Alys, Lari Pittman, John Baldessari, just to name a few artists part of his portfolio. López also emerged as a steadfast patron of up-and-coming Mexican artists such as Gabriel Orozco and Damian Ortega; he greatly contributed to shift their careers into high gear. It is no chance occurrence that about 15% of the López collection consists of works by Mexican artists, and the collection is one of the world's most important public showcases of Latin American art.

López’s path towards contemporary art goes back to his early days spent in Los Angeles, the metropolis he has adopted as a second home. He moved to the city in 1994 and started his own art gallery—the Chac Mool Gallery— that operated until 2005. “I opened it on Roberston Boulevard representing Latin American artists because I needed an excuse to live outside of Mexico City,” he remembers. “I could convince my father that it was a business.” “Basically, I always wanted to live outside of Mexico, either New York or Los Angeles," he goes on explaining. "I wanted to get out of my own shadow, maybe, my own friends, my own circle of people. It was like always the same, you know, and I needed a change. And it was also that I was working with my father my entire life, had been there, and trained and educated to be always with the company, running the company. So Los Angeles was like fresh air for me.” “Eugenio, like so many Latin Americans, didn’t swallow the Kool-Aid that New York was the center of the avant-garde,” remembers Ray Smith, the prominent Mexican American artist who befriended López in the ’80s. “For many of us, the California scene was more happening—you had guys like Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. New York represents art as suffering. LA is outdoor, fun, it’s the ’hood, it’s the American dream.”

At the time, art adviser Esthella Provas used to advise him on various artists. With Provas’s advice, he began acquiring pieces by Robert Motherwell, a large oil stick drawing by Richard Serra, a Roman series painting by Twombly—he now has five pieces from various periods by the artist—and a Judd from the Progression series. “Art changed my life,” he says.  In the 2000s, he began approaching Conceptual art: “I saw a Robert Ryman in the Sotheby’s catalogue, estimated at $200,000 to $300,000. I knew there must be a reason behind this all-white painting,” López says. Following this new turn, Donald Judd’s Amber Stack, 1987; Dan Flavin’s iconic neon Untitled (Monument for V. Tatlin), 1964; a floor piece by Carl Andre, Lead Aluminum Alloy Square, 1969;  Damien Hirst’s Memories Lost, Fragments of Paradise, 2003, a medicine cabinet containing 7,000 aspirin; Robert Gober’s Flying Sink, 1985 were added to collection soon after. Around 2001, Koons’s Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1986, joined the collection, too. López bought it for $350,000 from L&M Arts in New York. This piece has pride of place in the Los Angeles penthouse where López spends his time when he is not in Mexico or traveling around the globe in search for new pieces.

Jeff Koons’s Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1986 installed at López’s house in Los Angeles. Eugenio López Alonso.

Jeff Koons’s Elephant (Yellow), 2004, dominates the lawn of López’s mansion.Eugenio López Alonso.

Aqui Bacardi, a 1986 painting by artist Jeff Koons, presides over one end of the living room in López’s art-filled bachelor mansion. Eugenio López Alonso.

A work by the late Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies is displayed next to book shelves in López’s study. Eugenio López Alonso.

López’s collecting ethos developed in crescendo, but certainly not without the natural need to analyze more deeply the nature of what he was seeing around. Mike Kelley and McCarthy, for instance, were difficult for him initially. But based on his instinct to discover rather than retreat, he collected both of them. He bought Kelley’s Bladder, 1983, for $40,000 from Blum & Poe, and one of McCarthy’s first Santa installations, Tokyo Santa, Santa’s Trees, 1999, for about $150,000 from the same gallery. López gifted this latter one to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles after joining its board in 2005. The collector has emerged as one of Los Angeles’s leading arts patrons. “Eugenio is one of the great patrons and collectors of our time,” says former director of MOCA Jeffrey Deitch. The daring vision of López has been acknowledged also by Ortega, one of the most present artists in the collection, and whose iconic work Cosmic Thing, a  disassembled and suspended Volkswagen Beetle was acquired by Los Ageles MOCA with part of the money donated by López. Ortega says that Lopez bought several of his works, even though these were difficult pieces to install and maintain. "It made an impact, his own audacity in starting to collect young artists of Mexico with a lot of energy, and this has given enthusiasm to some other collectors to forget their fear and to get closer to knowing and collecting a little," Ortega says.

Although collecting is a personal journey and each collector certainly wants to shape and highlight his own vision, López recognizes to have some role models. The late Victor and Sally Ganz—self-taught, eagle-eyed buyers who snapped up Mel Bochner, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, alongside an encyclopedic range of Picassos; his friends Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Miami-based collectors who hold a strong array of Cubans and Latin Americans. But it was a visit to London’s Saatchi Gallery and its YBA pieces that was the enlightening moment when he realized he could train his eye on the works of his own time.

Paul McCarthy, Tokyo Santa, Santa’s Trees, 1999, twenty-two Christmas trees, table, fifteen C-prints, ten works on paper, cardboard boxes, Santa suit, carpet stuffed monkey, chocolate, ketchup, paint, and Nobuyoshi Araki photograph. Partial and promised gift of Eugenio López. Courtesy of MOCA Los Angeles.

Damian Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002, the first episode of The Beetle Trilogy, featured in the 2003 Venice Biennale. Courtesy of MOCA Los Angeles.

López prefers to pursue artists in depth, and it is with no surprise that he has been labeled the Mexican Medici. Therefore, his collection is multi-layered. “I think the collection has various cores. On one hand, the pieces by artists working in Mexico, with which we began the collection: Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Kuri, Damián Ortega, Santiago Sierra, Mario García Torres, Pedro Reyes, Teresa Margolles, Abraham Cruzvillegas among many others; and also works by American artists like Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and work by artists from the ’60s and ’70s such as Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, On Kawara and Robert Smithson. These are artists that give an axis and a heart to the whole collection.”

In March 2001, due to the growing size of the collected body of work, officially known as La Coleccion Jumex, López decided to open it the public. After transforming one of his father’s factories on the outskirts of Mexico City, López moved his striking assemblage of contemporary works in the refurbished 15,000-square-foot white cube of a building on the grounds of the giant Jumex plant.  But this was not enough to satisfy the collector’s desire to share his passion. As the foundation and its holdings grew, López contemplated building a purpose-built home for it in a more accessible location. His father surprised him with the gift of a prime site in Mexico City, which he procured during a lunch with Carlos Slim Helú, the wealthiest man in the world. López Sr negotiated to buy acreage adjacent to the Museo Soumaya, opened by Slim. Straight after, Eugenio López Alonso embarked on the adventure to build the permanent home of his personal Wunderkammer. In November 2013, after four years of work, the Museo Jumex, in the heart of Mexico City’s fashionable Polanco district part of a wider urban redevelopment, opened its doors to the public. Designed by British architect David Chipperfield, the striking new museum has 40,000 square feet of exhibition space, and showcases the Jumex collection as well as world-class exhibitions, such as Latin America’s first show of Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder’s solo show Discipline of the dance, among others. López instructed Chipperfield, who at the time had just been awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, the world’s most prestigious cultural prize, to cut no corners in construction. “It was built with the same quality as any top museum in London or Berlin,” López says. “We went all over the world to get the best components.” “I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Eugenio and his family,” said Chipperfield in an interview for Sotheby’s magazine. “They have been exemplary to work with. They understood what was necessary to make a good project and then gave all the support necessary. I couldn’t have been happier with the process.”

View of Museo Jumez  and of the adjacent  Museo Soumaya.

Installation views of  A Place in Two Dimensions: A Selection From Colección Jumex+Fred Sandback. Courtesy Colección Jumex, México.

Several people in the art world have offered high praise of López’s devotion to contemporary art, and visionary approach. Take for example, MOCA curator Alma Ruiz. She says that it's unusual in Latin culture for a second-generation heir such as Lopez to branch out from his parents' tastes, rather than simply adopt theirs. She also says that López isn't one of those collectors who feels obliged to show off his knowledge about art and artists. "He's extremely unassuming, never asks for anything back," Ruiz says. "The Jumex collection has helped so many people, and they don't even know." Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin offers her praise, too: “Eugenio is one of those people who makes a big difference in the places he loves. His commitment to weaving cultural connections between the U.S and Mexico has been spectacular.” “By digging into his own pocket to support contemporary art, Lopez has encouraged more rich Mexicans to support cutting-edge video, conceptual, installation and digital works. That takes a rare talent in a culturally conservative country like Mexico,” says Richard Koshalek, former president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and former director of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, on whose board Lopez sits. "People collect in Mexico, but they tend to be very traditional in their tastes," Koshalek adds. "I think what really interested me in Eugenio was his exploratory instincts. He seemed to have an eye on the future, he seemed to be concerned with emerging artists. That takes a tremendous amount of intellectual courage."