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'People come into my house and gasp': what it's like to share your home with a museum-grade art collection

Maria Sukkar at her home in West London; behind her is a large scale oil painting, 'View Hung (2007)' by Cecily Brown - tereza cervenova
Maria Sukkar at her home in West London; behind her is a large scale oil painting, 'View Hung (2007)' by Cecily Brown - tereza cervenova

Behind a stately villa on a quiet west London road, beyond an emerald-green lawn with a giant yellow water slide and kids' paddling pool, there's a surprise. White Snow Dwarf 7 is not a dwarf at all, but a vast pot-bellied bronze sculpture wielding a phallus-like ear and a flaccid phallus-like nose.

By the American artist Paul McCarthy, the 2011 work is a rebuke to the cultural whitewashing the Disney dwarf represents. "But we shouldn't forget that it's funny," says its owner, the art collector Maria Sukkar, whose garden the dwarf now inhabits. "In a dark way."

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
The scuplture 'Self-Portrait as the Billy Goat (2011)' by Pawel Althamer, made from glazed ceramic, plastic, metal, resin cast, goat fur and used shoe, on a styrofoam plinth Credit: Tereza Cervenova

Since 2009, Sukkar, with her businessman-husband Malek, has been collecting art by the likes of Gillian Wearing, Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Lucas and Damián Ortega. Other pieces include defaced photography by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, and their own portraits rendered by Jake and Dinos Chapman.

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The Sukkars' collection is remarkable not only for its geographical reach, its heavy representation of female artists and its diversity of style, but because it is just nine years old and already exceeds 125 pieces. Nearly all are museum-worthy.

Obviously, given the prestige of the artists the Sukkars buy, it's a collection that represents a huge financial commitment.

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
Sukkar in her garden, with a black-bronze sculpture 'Portrait - Doubled Sided (2009)' by Thomas Houseago Credit: Tereza Cervenova

And yet, when the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Iwona Blazwick, visited the house they share with their three children, where much of the art is displayed, and asked if the couple might consider publicly showing it, they "just couldn't believe it", Sukkar recalls, shaking her head.

Around her neck and wrists, tanned deeply from a recent holiday, gold chains and evil-eye jewellery jangle merrily. "It was a very humbling experience," she continues, recalling how she handed over the collection database to the gallery, only for the curators to then mount four separate exhibitions of the works, shown throughout much of 2017 and 2018.

When I visit, the art is coming home. "It's a little all over the place. I need to rehang," says Sukkar, apologetically, telling The Telegraph's photographer, "You can move anything. Touch anything. This is not a museum."

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
Oil painting 'William S' (2012) by Luc Tuymans Credit: Tereza Cervenova

Much of what is on display, like the McCarthy sculpture, is savagely, thrillingly, uncompromising. Behind grey sofas and quirky Christophe Côme-designed glass doors, the eerie beauty of Pawel Althamer's Self-Portrait as the Billy Goat (2011) dominates a long drawing room as it sits, an almost-human caprid, on a block of styrofoam in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker.

Not long before, this same space had been filled by a Berlinde De Bruyckere sculpture, Quan, in which a life-sized naked body cast in wax seems to wrestle beneath a suffocating pillow.

"I've had a lot of people come into the house and gasp," says Sukkar, "but for us, no art is too difficult to live with. I believe it's not only about the aesthetics of the work: there is a beauty beyond the appearance. There are ideas to consider."

Although for years they kept on their walls a Damien Hirst spin painting at the request of their young daughter. 'The picture is all about the last thing you see before you die,' says Sukkar, 'but for a five-year-old girl it's only about the colours and the glitter.'

Unlike her husband, who as a boy fled Lebanon with his family for East Sheen when civil war broke out in 1975, Sukkar remained in Beirut. Her father was an engineer, whose factories were damaged by bombs and bullets; her mother was a professor of epidemiology.

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
'Nice Tits' by Sarah Lucas (2011) Credit: Tereza Cervenova

"There were times when the fighting was frightening," she says, "but you carried on, you went to school, you saw your friends, and when your area was hit, you went underground and waited until the bombardment was over. Then you got back to life again.

"Sometimes my mother would pack everyone in the family a suitcase and we wouldn't return home for a year. We learnt to survive on very little. That's the reason a lot of the pieces I buy are to do with identity: it is what stays with you at the end of the day, regardless of what you own or what you do."

Sukkar met Malek at a picnic in Beirut. They were both 26, and he was newly returned to the city for business, while she was practising as a clinical nutritionist. (He now helms Averda, a Lebanese multinational waste-management company, founded by his father).

Eight years after marrying, they moved to London in 2004 - Malek missed his parents, who had remained in East Sheen. But while Maria had visited the capital often, she had never lived in it. When a friend organised weekly art tours visiting studios and galleries, she discovered its contemporary art scene.

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
The white sculpture hanging on the wall is 'Earth Mask II (2011)' by Thomas Houseago, made from Tuf-Cal (plaster), hemp and iron rebar Credit: Tereza Cervenova

Sukkar had no formal art education, although as a child she had watched her mother collect Sèvres porcelain and old masters. Her first married home in Beirut, with its Jean-Charles de Castelbajac carpets and Roche Bobois furniture, piqued her interest in design.

She soon enrolled on a two-year history of art course at Sotheby's Institute. "About this time, I started buying art," she says, "and my husband got interested too."

The first piece the couple bought was by Antony Gormley, a bronze figure curled in the fetal position. Next, they moved into YBAs.

Tracey Emin came to the opening night of their first Whitechapel Gallery show. "We displayed a pen and ink nude of hers next to a Louise Bourgeois, and I could feel her energy changed. She can be critical, but this connection made her happy," says Sukkar, who admits that meeting the artists she collects can be enlightening, or a little disappointing.

"A lot of them don't want to discuss their work. And I understand: it is just an idea and it came to life. But what interests me in art particularly are the stories behind the pieces."

Maria Sukkar art collection - Credit: Tereza Cervenova
Today, the Sukkars acquire most of their pieces at Art Basel and Frieze London Credit: Tereza Cervenova

It was only when the Sukkars had amassed a significant number of works that they sought the help of art advisors, turning to west London-based consultants Prue O'Day and Anatol Orient. O'Day wrote them a list of galleries they were never to buy from and insisted that from then on all purchases went through them. They still do.

Today, the Sukkars acquire most of their pieces at Art Basel and Frieze London, and many of the gallerists have become their friends - when Maria's third child was born, Manuela Wirth, one half of the mighty Hauser & Wirth, knitted him a Babygro.

And Maria now sits on boards for the ICA, the home for contemporary art founded in 1947; and The Showroom, a non-profit gallery in east London - plus three committees for the Tate.

The Sukkars' collection also includes many of the key players from the Venice Biennale, which opens next month, including Cathy Wilkes and Eva Rothschild, showing in the British and Irish pavilions respectively.

As Sukkar stands before a powerful Anish Kapoor sculpture that hangs above her dining room mantelpiece, she reflects on what art has done for her.

"It made me realise that all cultures can come together, which I know sounds very clichéd but art bridges a gap: it reminds you of things you used to do; it tells the story of who you are and who you are going to be."

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