What drives a collector? A private art collection often reveals so much more than the taste, aesthetic, or style of one or two individuals. A collection can reflect a life’s journey, personal beliefs, inspirations, and influences, alongside the simple pleasure of possessing and developing a relationship with art, and the desire to support artists and share art with others.

Based in Darwin, Northern Territory, a city at the forefront of Indigenous Australian art, Markus Spazzapan and Suzan Cox share a motivation to support artists whose work displays an intimate and dynamic relationship with the land.

For many, especially the older artists within their collection, it is a relationship established in pre-contact times. The pleasure of owning works by artists such as Nora Wompi from Balgo, Sally Gabori or Papunya Tula Artist Ningura Napurrula is that by looking at and living with their art, one can walk the ancestral country within a painting, forming a new relationship with and respect for the land on which we live and work.

REVERENCE 2021 features a selection of exceptional works from the Spazzapan Cox Collection. Ahead of the exhibition, I recently spoke to Markus Spazzapan about how it all began…

VM – What inspired you to start collecting art? 

MS – Runs in the family, I guess! There was always art hung on our walls, propped up in odd places, and art was discussed. When I worked on a cattle station in central Australia in the mid 70s, I came across art that I had never seen before. It felt like I had discovered treasure.

VM – What is the motivation behind your collection? 

MS – To support artists and to enrich our visual realm.

VM – What do you look for in a work of art?

MS – An unwavering attachment to the land and for the older artists, the fact that they walked upon their country with either no interaction or very sporadic interaction with non-aboriginal people, some having only ‘walked in’ when they were adults.

VM – Being based in Darwin in the NT, you are at the forefront of Indigenous Australian Art. How much has being a Darwin resident shaped your collection?  

MS – Many communities had vibrant art workshops from which materials were dispensed, art produced, and culture strengthened. These places were like being a child in a lolly shop. My friendships with Margie West, Dallas Gold, Karen Brown, Matt Ward and Paul Johnson who somehow were able to form relationships with art centres and artists allowing them to exhibit at times mind-blowing bodies of works of art. I live on aboriginal land and wherever I travel in the NT, WA and SA I find myself on aboriginal land. The land exists and aboriginal people are dynamic participants in the land and aboriginal art reflects this reality.

VM – Have you had many opportunities to meet the artists who created the artworks within your collection? 

MS – I have met far too few of the artists whose works I collect. One artist I had the pleasure of meeting came to the big smoke from their far-flung homeland, English being their fifth or six language. Slow and thoughtful conversation elicits place, family relationships, connections, responsibility. Once I was told by an artist that a piece of art has no ‘story’ and another that the painting was ‘a big wind that blows over trees’. Both Suzan and I met Elizabeth Nyumi not long after we had purchased her work and we have a lovely photo of that meeting. Suzan was enthralled by the work that the late Prince of Wales was painting on the ground outside Karen Brown’s Gallery some years ago and spoke with him, before arranging to buy it before it was finished, because she loved what she saw him painting.

VM – Are you particularly interested in contemporary art by Indigenous Australian artists or do you have other non-Indigenous artists in your collection also? 

MS – I am agnostic when it comes to art, I love artists who have a burning need to create art every day until they are no more.

Collectors play a vital role in supporting artists – whether it be a significant or modest addition – each acquired work of art also contributes to the unfolding of art history. Although a rare event due to many of the artists’ remote homelands, Markus and Suzan met several artists within their collection, including Prince of Wales and Elizabeth Nyumi. These meetings are experiences they cherish, and ones which only deepen their devotion to the cultural empowerment of contemporary Australian art and artists that their collecting supports.