Discover the history of Jean Pigozzi's collection

I became interested in contemporary art very early on and began to buy pieces taking quite a scattered approach. Then, I discovered contemporary African art in 1989, when I visited the exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" at Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, organized by the Centre Pompidou and curated by Jean Hubert Martin.

It was quite a shock. I knew nothing about contemporary art in Africa, and the works by Chéri Samba, Frédérique Bruly Bouabré, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Esther Mahlangu, and Seyni Awa Camara really blew me away.

I then decided to begin a collection devoted exclusively to living artists working in sub-Saharan Africa, in collaboration with André Magnin, who was the deputy curator of "Magiciens de la Terre," who already knew a lot about the region, and dreamed of being able to keep exploring it.

What interested me about most of these artists was that their work was absolutely unique and unrelated to any school or art movement. Furthermore, for the most part they had no knowledge of art history.

I'm a pretty obsessive collector, I've made personal choices without any speculative intentions, and also without any ideas of putting together a showcase of contemporary African art, as a result of which some of today's very well-known artists are not in my collection at all.

Over the last 30 years, I've assembled large groups of work by many artists from about 20 very different African countries. The collection continues to expand and it currently consists of more than 10,000 pieces.

I'm particularly happy about the many exhibitions we have organized all over the world, which have contributed a great deal to the recognition of contemporary African art within the art world, as well as allowing a wide audience to discover artists from the continent.

Alongside this, from 2010 onward, I began to get interested in very young Japanese artists, born after 1985. I built this collection on my own, by making regular trips to Japan and exploring numerous galleries. One particularly interesting aspect of this collection is that about 40% of it consists of work by female artists, which is a very high proportion.

The pieces are, of course, very different to my African collection—they're more eclectic, and abstract art plays a larger role among them. This young Japanese scene is relatively unknown in the West, but it is beginning to attract a lot more interest.