Top 200 Collectors

One of five billionaire sons of Enrique Coppel Tamayo, who created a Mexican retail empire targeted at low-income shoppers, Agustín Coppel serves as chairman and chief executive of his father’s holding company, Grupo Coppel. With his brothers, he also has interests in a bank, a retirement-fund management company, and real estate. According to the international accounting firm Deloitte, Coppel is ranked 156th-largest retailer in the world. Agustín and his wife Isabel have assembled one of Mexico’s most notable collections of contemporary art—one that includes works by local stars Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Gabriel Orozco, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Damián Ortega, as well as pieces by global artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Lygia Clark, Ed Ruscha, Hélio Oiticica, Tatiana Trouvé, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Terence Koh. Their nonprofit also sponsors exhibitions, publications, research and public art projects.

In 2011, the Coppels lent 100 works from their collection to the Museum of Latin American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in California for a two-venue show called “Mexico: Expected/Unexpected.” The exhibition showcased key figures of the Mexican contemporary art scene, including Alÿs, Orozco, Carlos Amorales, Iñaki Bonillas, Cruzvillegas, Jorge Méndez Blake, and Pedro Reyes beside international figures such as Clark, William Eggleston, and Matta-Clark. According to the show’s online statement, “Painting, photography, installation, video art, sculpture, and text pieces are gathered into sections such as poetics of craftsmanship, the relationship between city and nature, structural affinities, the iconography of nationalism, imagery of death and mortality, constructive logic, archival accumulation and grouping, and precariousness of everyday life.”