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’s 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.
Born 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.
In an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Homem recounted, “I 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.” Later in the same interview, he said, “I 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’s a kind of distillation of our lives, of years of our lives. And so I think it becomes much richer.”
Homem 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 André 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’s 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.
In the fall of 2025 Homem helped open the Sonnabend Collection Mantova in restored spaces in the Palazzo della Ragione, a medieval palace in the center of the city. Among the highlights of the museum are Jasper Johns’s Figure 8 (1958), Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Aloha (1962), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Kite (1963), as well as an installation of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–66).
In tribute to Homem, Mario Codognato, director of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, said, “Antonio 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.”
