Antonio Homem, who began working with the storied gallerist Ileana Sonnabend within the Sixties and went on to supervise her assortment and preserve her and husband Michael Sonnabend’s legacy as supporters of a few of the most necessary figures of post-war modern artwork, has died on the age of 86. The information was introduced by the Sonnabend Assortment Mantova, a museum Homem helped open within the north of Italy in 2025.
Born in Portugal in 1939, Homem moved to Switzerland as a youngster and studied engineering earlier than he solidified his curiosity within the arts upon assembly Ileana Sonnabend, who satisfied him to work at her gallery in Paris in 1968.
In an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Artwork, Homem recounted, “I need to say that Ileana and Michael had been very a lot the actual mother and father for me, within the sense that they did present me what I wished and what I may very well be.” Later in the identical interview, he stated, “I all the time stated that the gathering was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, for Michael, for me, and that for me could be very attention-grabbing. In different phrases, a piece is simply not one thing one purchased for a specific amount in the mean time; it’s a form of distillation of our lives, of years of our lives. And so I believe it turns into a lot richer.”
Homem helped Sonnabend open her gallery in New York in 1971, within the beginnings of the burgeoning Soho scene. Sonnabend shared a constructing with fellow sellers Leo Castelli, John Weber, and André Emmerich, and continued as a commanding presence because the gallery moved to Chelsea in 2000. After her dying in 2007, on the age of 92, Homem took over because the gallery’s director and, two years later, established the Sonnabend Assortment Basis to keep up a set that features works by a protracted record of luminaries together with Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Schifano, Andy Warhol, and lots of extra.
Within the fall of 2025 Homem helped open the Sonnabend Assortment Mantova in restored areas within the Palazzo della Ragione, a medieval palace within the heart of town. Among the many highlights of the museum are Jasper Johns’s Determine 8 (1958), Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Aloha (1962), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Kite (1963), in addition to an set up of Andy Warhol’s Display screen Exams (1964–66).
In tribute to Homem, Mario Codognato, director of the Sonnabend Assortment Mantova, stated, “Antonio has intelligently and sensitively preserved and transmitted the cultural legacy of Ileana and Michael Sonnabend. His passing leaves an amazing void within the worldwide artwork neighborhood.”
