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With Ostillo Art Foundation, Collector René Campos Wants to Challenge How Texas Sees Art

Led by Sacha Zerbib, Campos's new Austin space turns his private collection into a public platform for provocative contemporary art.

A new foundation has just opened in Austin, as the Texas art scene continues to flex its muscles with studios, galleries and unconventional art spaces. A largely self-sustaining cultural geography has developed across the state since the postwar era and continues to thrive today without needing much attention from outside, yet increasingly, Texas is being recognized by the wider art world as a contemporary cultural destination worth checking out. Austin, in particular, may be more of a music city, but the new Ostillo Art Foundation aims to shuffle the deck, claiming a place for the city within Texas’s art ecosystem.

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Newly opened in September, it is the brainchild of Austin real estate developer and collector René Campos. With him on the journey from idea to implementation was Sacha Zerbib, the Paris- and Austin-based art adviser who has guided his collecting for years and now serves as Ostillo’s founding director and chief curator.

After studying at UT Austin and earning an M.B.A. from Harvard, Campos made his fortune in real estate. He founded Eureka Holdings in 2001 after co-founding Hartex Property Group, a multifamily investment and management company that amassed more than 14,000 residential units, reportedly valued at more than $500 million, before it was sold. Over the past nine years, he has assembled a collection that numbers close to 100 works. He deliberately chose not to put his own name on the art center, even as it reflects his tastes. Ostillo instead takes its name from Ostilio Ricci, the Italian mathematics professor who taught Galileo and gave him the intellectual foundations that would enable him to revolutionize science.

The decision to establish a nonprofit, public-facing foundation brought a new sense of responsibility to Campos’s collecting practice. Once a public institution became the goal, acquisitions were approached with greater historical rigor and a heightened awareness of what building a collection for public display entails. “From the beginning, we have tried to have what I would call a museum-like selection practice and to select what we consider relevant to art history,” Zerbib tells Observer. “We spend a lot of time researching and selecting the artists that we want for the foundation. Once we have identified an artist, we spend a great deal of time choosing the right series,” he continues. “There has always been that disciplined approach to selecting art. And that is also why it is not about us. It is about art.”

Austin was a deliberate choice as well; it’s a rapidly expanding city where culture plays an important role but contemporary art still has room to grow. “We felt there was room to do it,” he says. “You........

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