Welcome home, Frank Cohen.

Feb 11, 2010 | Comments: 5

Susie Stubbs meets one of the world’s most influential art collectors – and wonders why he hasn’t shown his work in Manchester until now

Read up about Frank Cohen and you’ll come across some conflicting views. The press has dubbed the private collector the ‘Saatchi of the North’. One Guardian critic, meanwhile, has gone on record to savage both Cohen and his sprawling collection of international art. And then there’s Sir Nicholas Serota, who was up north last week to open Cohen’s new show at Manchester Art Gallery. ‘Frank Cohen is quite simply one of the great collectors working anywhere in Europe or America today,’ said Sir Nick before addressing him directly. ‘Frank, you are always at the leading edge.’

Serota is right: Frank Cohen is one of the world’s most influential and prolific collectors of contemporary art. He began collecting modern British art in the 1970s (‘I had 37 works by Lowry at one point’) but, in 1988, came across a young Damien Hirst. Through him, Cohen discovered a group of artists who would go on to achieve unprecedented public profile – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas – and he never looked back, moving from the YBAs to American and German artists and, more recently, to contemporary Asian art.

Cohen is a Manchester man born and bred. He still lives here (he says he left Manchester years ago but actually lives just down the road in Wilmslow), and made his fortune with a national DIY chain. He has devoted himself to collecting artwork since 1997 and describes it as ‘like running a business. My business is art and I work seven days a week at it.’ When the pre-recession art boom forced prices up, Cohen decided to focus his attentions on the East, to up-and-coming artists working in Japan, China and India, and it is this work that forms the current exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, Facing East.

Once Cohen and his long-time curatorial partner, David Thorpe, had visited the gallery in Manchester, they decided to select a series of large-scale sculptures, installations and paintings that would make the most of its vast floor space and high ceilings. ‘I wanted this to be a show that would work in Manchester, and also to be a bright, fun show that kids would enjoy but has a deeper meaning – so you can get into the nitty gritty of it if you want to,’ says Cohen. And the work on display does exactly that: bright colours, gloss finishes and towering sculptures stretch out into the gallery, enticing visitors in and offering both visual satisfaction and intellectual intrigue. There is, for example, something disturbing about Jiten Thukal and Sumir Tagra’s Coming Soon At Your Neighbourhood, which doesn’t so much hint at the uneasy relationship between East and West as batter you over the head with it. This is work that suggests that the two cultures are at loggerheads – and it’s not clear whether the consumerist West has won or is, in fact, about to be beaten into submission by a hyper-real, angry and re-energised version of itself.

Despite Cohen’s enthusiasm for exhibiting his work (he has run his own industrial gallery, Initial Access, in Wolverhampton since 2007), and despite the fact that he lives just down the road, he remains remarkably little known in Manchester. For years, Cohen tried to secure an exhibition space in the city with little success. ‘I’ve been in that many negotiations but the conversations just went on and on,’ he says. ‘But there are more kids on the block now who understand contemporary art. Liverpool would have bitten my hand off but I’d rather work in Manchester and I hope this exhibition will be the first of many.’

Frank Cohen is every PR officer’s nightmare: eye-wateringly honest and not one to hold things back. It may be this up-front approach, it may be his Northern roots or the fact that he doesn’t court the London critics in the same way as, say, Saatchi does, but until now Cohen has been either ignored by art critics – or, in one case, attacked by them. ‘You can never win with the critics,’ he says. ‘But to be honest I don’t give a shit. The ones that write bad things must think you are doing it for any other reason than you love it. Look, I am doing this with my own money and in my own time – so you have to ask yourself, what more do they want?’ Such bold statements may make his press team shudder but this approach is Cohen’s trump card. He has nothing to hide, no axes to grind and no games to play: he is, as he says, a private collector who couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks. And his collection reflects just that. It is as playful as the city Cohen calls home – and as dark and unsettling, too. Welcome home, Frank Cohen. It may have been a long time, but it’s good to have you back.

Facing East: Recent works from China, India and Japan from the Frank Cohen Collection is on display at Manchester Art Gallery until 11 April. Free Entry. Susie Stubbs is the editor of Creative Tourist. Images (top to bottom): Between Men And Animal, 2005, Yue Minjun; Bharti Kher, The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006; both copyright the artist, courtesy The Frank Cohen Collection