Frank Cohen

Frank Cohen was born and raised in Manchester where he worked on a number of his own businesses before building up a home improvement superstore empire. In 1972, he bought his first work of art – The Family by L.S. Lowry. Throughout the 70s and 80s he continued to collect works by leading modern British artists including Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, and William Roberts. In 1988, the ‘Freeze’ exhibition co-curated by Damien Hirst fuelled his passion for contemporary art from all over the world.

Since 1997, Cohen’s collection has become his full-time occupation, and he has become one of Britain’s leading collectors of contemporary art, having been dubbed the ‘Saatchi of the North’.

In 2003, he was a judge on the Turner Prize panel. He has loaned works to major museums around the world including Tate, the Guggenheim in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and The National Portrait Gallery, London.

In 2007, Cohen opened Initial Access as a space to present exhibitions from the collection of over 1,000 works he owns. Sited on the outskirts of the millennium city of Wolverhampton in two refurbished warehouses that provide 10,000 sq feet of exhibition space, Initial Access shows different aspects of the collection in a series of exhibitions. The programme is designed to mount shows of new acquisitions to the collection and to give the public an opportunity to see world-class art.

There have been nine shows at Initial Access, these include Design for Living, Time Difference, Unholy Truths, Passage to India, Parts One and Two, Lightness of Being, Minimal Means, Attitude and Painting Is A Painting Is A Painting.

Among his most important works are pieces by Richard Prince, L.S. Lowry, William Roberts, Edward Burra, George Condo, Adrian Ghenie, David Salle, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Georg Baselitz.

In autumn 2008, works from Cohen’s collection took over four rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Manchester Art Gallery is showing Facing East: Recent works from China, India, and Japan from the Frank Cohen Collection from 4 February to 11 April 2010.

In 2009, Frank Cohen took part in the BBC programme School of Saatchi.

He founded the Dairy Art Centre in Bloomsbury in 2013, a contemporary art gallery, with shows Quicksand 2013, Island 2013, Every Angel Has A Dark Side 2014, Smoking Kills 2014, Greetings From A Place In My Heart 2014.

In March 2012, Frank and Cherryl Cohen exhibited some of their Modern British collection at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.

On 13 September 2016, Fortnum and Mason opened "Fortnum X Frank – FXF16,” an installation throughout the store of more than 60 Modern British and Contemporary works loaned from Cohen's collection, and “Fortnum X Frank - FXF17,” a show with John Bellany followed in Sept 2017.

In 2018, Cohen appeared in Sky Arts – The Art of Collecting, National Treasures. (Season 1 Episode 4)

Frank Cohen is widely known as one of the most influential collectors of international contemporary art, with a reputation for staying ahead of the trends in the contemporary art market. He has been collecting contemporary British art for over 30 years and has been in the forefront of collecting painting and sculpture from Asia, particularly where artists from China and India are concerned.

For more information, please visit www.initialaccess.co.uk.