Belmond Hotels’ nuanced relationship with art

Hotels are permanent structures that celebrate and facilitate transitory relationships between people and places, which makes Daniel Buren and Belmond’s joint MITICO project particularly interesting.

Belmond, which became part of LVMH in 2018 and includes some of the world’s most famous hotels in its portfolio, began attracting contemporary artists to a number of its properties in 2022 through the MITICO program, organized in collaboration with Galleria Continua. Previous artists who have participated in the program include Arcangelo Sassolino and Subodh Gupta. This year, for the first time, just one artist, Daniel Buren, created works at six of Belmond’s properties, including Villa San Michele in Tuscany, Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the Copacabana Beach Hotel in Rio de Janeiro and – most recently – the Cipriani Hotel in Venice .

They all aim to change the perspective of the guest or visitor. At Castello di Casole near Florence in Italy, Buren focused on the landscape, using black-and-white panels to focus on different areas of the landscape—a forest, an old farm, and a 10th-century village. “It’s not a frame, but a way of looking at the landscape. The Japanese word – shakei – a sense of borrowing a landscape is most appropriate,” he says. At Villa San Michele, colorful panels above the bar bathe customers and guests in patterns of light.

Buren has been creating “in situ” works since 1970 using white and colored panels. “It’s a work done in place, with the place, for the place,” Buren says of his work. “It can stay forever or disappear in six months” (All installations must be in place by at least the end of September.)

Buren’s work at Cipriani, launched in early April just before the Biennale, initially appears simple; a collection of panels in various transparent colors surrounding a small fountain at the entrance. “It’s a small fountain in a huge hotel,” he says. “I watched the adults walk past him, but the kids were drawn to him. Children always find the most interesting things.

Büren is no stranger to Venice – he won the Golden Lion at the Biennale in 1986. Much of his work was created in places of transit. In 2017, he created an artwork in the ticket hall of Tottenham Court Road tube station in London.

Hotels and art have a long history to gaze upon and ponder. Check into Zurich’s Dolder Grand and you can spend hours staring at paintings by Salvador Dali or sculptures by Giacometti. More recently, there are art museums that incorporate hotel rooms—the Benesse Art Site in Japan is a leading example—and there are hotels owned by gallerists, including Hauser & Wirth’s Fife Arms, and/or those with strong contemporary art collections and artists-in-residence , such as Aristide Hotel in Syros, Greece.

Belmond’s MITICO program falls between public and gallery art. Yes, for guests to be able to experience art at different times and at their leisure will always be a huge privilege, but as part of Buren’s MITICO project at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, he created colorful window panels across the white facade of the hotel since 1920. “I didn’t think the hotel would allow it,” Buren says, but it’s a striking artistic statement that affects both those on the beach who can see the installation in its entirety and the guests. “People staying at the hotel activate them by turning on the lights, so they participate as well.”