[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Antonio_Homem.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tAntonio Homem, who started working with the storied gallerist Ileana Sonnabend in the 1960s and went on to oversee her collection and maintain her and husband Michael Sonnabend\u2019s legacy as supporters of some of the most important figures of post-war contemporary art, has died at the age of 86. The news was announced by the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, a museum Homem helped open in the north of Italy in 2025.<\/p>\n
\n\tBorn in Portugal in 1939, Homem moved to Switzerland as a teenager and studied engineering before he solidified his interest in the arts upon meeting Ileana Sonnabend, who convinced him to work at her gallery in Paris in 1968. <\/p>\n
\n\tIn an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Homem recounted, \u201cI must say that Ileana and Michael were very much the real parents for me, in the sense that they did show me what I wanted and what I could be.\u201d Later in the same interview, he said, \u201cI always said that the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, for Michael, for me, and that for me is very interesting. In other words, a work is just not something one bought for a certain amount at the moment; it\u2019s a kind of distillation of our lives, of years of our lives. And so I think it becomes much richer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHomem helped Sonnabend open her gallery in New York in 1971, in the beginnings of the burgeoning Soho scene. Sonnabend shared a building with fellow dealers Leo Castelli, John Weber, and Andr\u00e9 Emmerich, and continued as a commanding presence as the gallery moved to Chelsea in 2000. After her death in 2007, at the age of 92, Homem took over as the gallery\u2019s director and, two years later, established the Sonnabend Collection Foundation to maintain a collection that includes works by a long list of luminaries including Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Schifano, Andy Warhol, and many more.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the fall of 2025 Homem helped open the Sonnabend Collection Mantova in restored spaces in the\u00a0Palazzo della Ragione, a medieval palace in the center of the city. Among the highlights of the museum are Jasper Johns\u2019s Figure 8<\/em> (1958),\u00a0Roy Lichtenstein\u2019s Little Aloha<\/em> (1962),\u00a0and Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s Kite<\/em>\u00a0(1963), as well as an installation of Andy Warhol\u2019s Screen Tests <\/em>(1964\u201366).<\/p>\n \n\tIn tribute to Homem, Mario Codognato, director of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, said, \u201cAntonio has intelligently and sensitively preserved and transmitted the cultural legacy of Ileana and Michael Sonnabend. His passing leaves a great void in the international art community.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/antonio-homem-dead-1234779198\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Antonio_Homem.jpg?w=1024″] Antonio Homem, who started working with the storied gallerist Ileana Sonnabend in the 1960s and went on to oversee her collection and maintain her and husband Michael Sonnabend\u2019s legacy as supporters of some of the most important figures of post-war contemporary art, has died at the age of 86. The news was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1853315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1853315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1853315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1853315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1853315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}