the collection

George Economou was born in Athens and is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He began his career in shipping, expanded into offshore drilling and real estate, and has had a passion for art throughout his career. His collecting activity began in the 1990s with a focus on early twentieth-century European art and has grown to include an important holding of postwar and contemporary art. In 2012 he opened a public exhibition space for the collection in the suburbs of Athens, which holds several exhibitions per year, often in collaboration with international institutions and curators. Mr. Economou is a non-executive trustee for the Tate Foundation, on the board of trustees of the Dia Art Foundation, and a benefactor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alexandra Economou is a collector. With her father George Economou, she advises and curates the George Economou Collection. She supports emerging international artists by collecting their work in depth and often supporting the production of new work, or contributing to projects that contextualize their practice. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Swiss Institute in New York, co-chair of the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council in New York, lead supporter of the Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize in London and a founding member of the Museum of Cycladic Art Young Patrons Committee in Athens, where she currently resides. Economou holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Skarlet Smatana is director of the George Economou Collection. Since taking this position in 2012, she has honed the objectives of the collection and spearheaded its exhibition program, contextualizing it within twentieth-century art-historical and contemporary discourse. She often partners and collaborates with major public institutions and private foundations worldwide to promote publicly exhibited collections as well as philanthropic and lending initiatives to support contemporary artists. At the George Economou Collection in Athens, Smatana has co-organized solo exhibitions of artists including Jeff Wall, Jenny Saville, Charles Ray, David Hammons, and Rashid Johnson, as well as a two-person show of Georg Baselitz and Paul McCarthy. Each of these exhibitions has been accompanied by a monograph featuring scholarly essays by acclaimed writers and curators. Before joining the George Economou Collection, Smatana worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice as well as at leading contemporary art galleries, among them Pace Gallery, New York; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; and, as director, at L&M Arts, New York. Throughout her career in galleries and independently, she has built some of the most important collections worldwide and advised prominent institutions in the United States. Smatana has an MA in art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on postwar and contemporary art and is an accredited member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors.