Koons installation lights up Greek island for his collector friend Dakis Joannou

The rays of Jeff Koons’s impressive new golden sun sculpture turn like the sails of a windmill as a breeze blows over the Aegean. More than nine metres high, the sculpture is situated on the roof of a small slaughterhouse on a cliff on the island of Hydra. The interior is transformed into a temple of Apollo, where the sculpture of the ancient Greek god of the sun, knowledge and the arts poses in the centre, surrounded by a snake that moves all too realistically.

The works were the artist’s 80th-birthday gift to his longtime friend and collector of his art, Dakis Joannou. The Greek-Cypriot industrialist is one of the world’s leading art collectors and creator of the Athens-based Deste Foundation. Due to Covid, the project was postponed for two years and no one knew what Koons was planning to do.

“The biggest present that Jeff could give me was the gift of the first experience. I was completely overwhelmed,” Joannou says of the first time he saw what Koons had been preparing.

For the past 14 years, Joannou and his Deste Foundation have invited some of the world’s most famous contemporary artists — Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Kara Walker, Urs Fischer and Kiki Smith, among others — to take over the old slaughterhouse and transform it into their art space for a few months.

Joannou says he wanted to give them “a challenge”, offering them a limited budget to create work for this unique environment. For him, turning art into a public good is essential. “You need to use art as a communication vehicle, not store it and keep it to yourself. I’m interested not only in provoking a reaction but, more importantly, starting a conversation.”

The project was the culmination of decades of love for art. “My interest started when I was at school. I would buy all these Skira books, which at that time were printed in black and white, with glued-on coloured images” he says.

This interest led him to create the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art in Geneva in 1983, which throughout the 1980s and ’90s supported exhibitions showcasing artistic trends in Greece, Cyprus and Switzerland. The main aim was to demonstrate the universality of contemporary art. “I was very interested in the ‘conversation’ around art,” he says.

Becoming a collector had not crossed his mind at that point. “I was against collecting. I thought it was selfish to take the art away from the public. I didn’t understand the concept of collecting at the time and I thought it was all about acquiring trophies.”

A few years later, as a frequent business traveller to New York, he would often end up strolling through galleries in the East Village with his friend Jeffrey Deitch, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, who was at the time an art adviser at Citibank.

“It was May 1985 when we walked in a small gallery and I was faced with this incredible piece,” he says referring to “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” by Jeff Koons, an unknown artist at the time. The work consisted of a basketball hovering at the centre of a tank filled with water and appearing to defy the laws of gravity.

When you put a painting next to another, it changes — that painting will read differently

Joannou asked to see the artist before buying it. He spent hours talking with Koons at his studio and, impressed by the artist’s mind, ended up buying the piece for $2,500. From then on, Joannou acquired more pieces from Koons and his friends. “A couple of years later, I realised I had a collection,” he says. “If it wasn’t for [‘One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank’] maybe I would have never become a collector,” he says.

The two men became close friends, and when Koons found himself in a precarious financial situation in the mid-1990s during the creation of his costly “Celebration” collection, Joannou came to his aid. But this relationship is not a one-off. The collector develops personal relationships with the majority of the artists he collects, such as Fischer and Cattelan. Before acquiring art he likes to meet the artists and get to know them. “You may see something that looks good and then talk to the artist and realise it’s just a decorative piece,” he says.

It was this that changed his attitude to collecting. “I realised it can be something very creative,” he says. “Someone told me that I’m not a collector of objects but a collector of friends,” he laughs.

From early in his life, Joannou was involved in the family business in Cyprus. He started working with his father in the construction business in the late 1960s. When Turkey invaded in 1974, he moved with his family first to London and then to Athens, which resulted in an expansion of his business with construction projects in the Middle East, north Africa and Europe. He also owns shares in several other companies, ranging from the shipping sector to real estate, a major distributor of Coca-Cola and the hospitality sector.

At 82, he feels that his generation of “traditional collectors” is dwindling, and that collecting has become more transactional. “Many collectors nowadays don’t talk about art but about prices, what a great deal they got, or how proud they are of their successful bidding,” he says. “I’m not interested in talking about prices, I want to talk about values.”

Joannou lives with his art: his home is filled with pieces by Chris Ofili, Roberto Cuoghi, Judith Bernstein, Koons, Paul McCarthy, and many others, and he constantly changes his art around and re-curates his own space. “When I have new ideas and I want to express something else I change it all accordingly,” he says. “When you put a painting next to another, it changes — that painting will read differently. That’s what’s so exciting about the process.”

Joannou is a member of the boards and councils of major museums such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is a member of the International Council of Tate.

I ask him about the importance of keeping his collection relevant to current social issues. “Although social issues cannot be removed from art, they cannot dominate . . . this is not how art works,” he says. “I want to be relevant but at the same time, I need to do what I feel like doing. If that’s relevant it will show in time, if it becomes irrelevant it becomes irrelevant. What puts me off is [a] trendy approach to art.”

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