Alan Gibbs' landmark decisions

AT his property just north of Auckland, Alan Gibbs' collection of site-specific art just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

SEEING Alan Gibbs, one of New Zealand's wealthiest businessmen, traversing the rolling landscape of his 400ha property, talking about one sculpture after another, is to feel Gibbs' excitement for the place and the art.

He is as enthusiastic as a boy in a toy store – and with good reason. In 1991, when he bought the land now laconically known as The Farm, he already had three decades of significant art collecting behind him. Commissioning artworks was in the back of his mind “but not the major purpose” of searching for a rural retreat. In hindsight, it’s clear that 1991 marked the beginning of a new art-collecting adventure for him.

Gibbs is a rare breed for several reasons. He has made a total commitment to open-brief commissioning of major, site-specific works from key artists. He is forming a collection of permanent private commissions of the scale that nowadays are more often temporary and the province of public institutions. And by rolling up his sleeves alongside the artists, he too faces the boundary-pushing challenges that come with an open brief: to play, puzzle and solve. Gibbs has become the artists’ accomplice and is often, as a consequence, the art producer.

Gibbs and his then wife Jenny (herself an art collector and philanthropist) started collecting in the 1960s. By the early ’90s, when they parted company, they had amassed probably the best collection of works by key New Zealand artists. After starting with an interest in abstract expressionism, Gibbs developed a “taste for abstract minimalist art”.

Read the full story in the November 2009 edition of Wish magazine, free inside The Australian on Friday, November 6.