Thinking It Forward: Selections from the Elie Khouri Collection
— The Arts Club, Dubai 24 February — 01 June 2021

The collection of Elie Khouri represents a touchstone for international, contemporary, and cutting-edge excellence in art—not only in the Middle East but around the world. Among the many issues artists in his collection addressed are globalisation, identity politics, and the effects of new technology on perception and communication, as well as enduring considerations of truth, beauty, and the natural world. Works by British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Mexican-American Aliza Nisenbaum, American artists Arcmanoro Niles, Shara Hughes, Matt Connors, Henry Taylor, Derrick Adams, Jesse Mockrin and Julie Curtiss, Polish artist Paulina Olowska, Swiss artist Nicolas Party, Iranian artist Maryam Hoseini and German master Günther Förg were selected from the much larger list of contemporary masters in the Khouri Collection.

Having worked in marketing services and advertising for over 30 years, Elie Khouri is the Chairman & CEO of Omnicom Media Group, the media services division of the global marketing communications company Omnicom Group in MENA. Khouri is an ardent supporter of the regional and global art community; he is a member of the Media and Performance Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as the Tate’s Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee. He has been consistently collecting contemporary art for over a decade and is working towards establishing the Elie Khouri Art Foundation, which he hopes will serve as a leading global and independent centre for the research into collecting and collecting practices, provoking discourse on how, why and where collections are curated, displayed and disseminated into the public.