The Collector: José Teixeira, Portugal’s ‘Ugly Duckling’

It’s not often your boss insists you take a reading break during working hours, let alone a philosophy seminar or a painting class. For the businessman and patron, José Teixeira, chairman of the DST Group, one of Portugal’s largest industrial conglomerates and employer of 4,000 people, it’s simply a matter of good business.

“Businesses do not recognise that art has economic value,” says Teixeira, sitting down with The Art Journal. “Where do high-performance products come from? From the most competitive countries. And the most competitive countries are, by nature, culturally driven.” For the family-owned DST Group, begun by his father in the 1940s and now comprising more than 50 companies operating across engineering, construction, energy, telecommunications and real estate, “culture is more than just another element, it is the first derivative”. Productivity and innovation depend on it, he asserts. “There needs to be ‘ant time’ – time to work. But equally, the cicadas must sing so that the work can take place.”

The Braga-based group spends around €2.5 million on its cultural programme per year, with a large portion going towards its collection of 1,500 artworks, which Teixeira selects himself. Do others in the business world think he’s crazy? “Maybe,” he shrugs with a smile. “But I make a lot of money doing this.” According to Forbes, the Teixeira family is Portugal’s 35th wealthiest, with an estimated fortune of €398 million.

MUZEU, aerial view. Photo: Hugo Delgado

At its 296-acre HQ on the outskirts of Braga, an hour north of Porto, several hundred artworks are woven into the daily routines of the construction workers, engineers and administrative staff based there. Making your way through the industrial park of factories, office buildings (two of which are Pritzker Prize winners) and the ‘Living Lab’, a research project by the Norman Foster Foundation, you will find an outdoor sculpture at every turn, often utilising construction materials or industrial waste generated by the group’s own factories. 

Highlights include Angela Ferreira’s Talk Tower for Ingrid Jonker, a colossal loudspeaker that amplifies the words of the South African poet who took her own life in an act of protest against apartheid, and Rael San Fratello’s installation, The Teetertotter House, an impressive steel structure that reimagines the US–Mexico border wall as a space of gathering and unification. Clearly, Teixeira is not one of those businesspeople who prefer to appear politically neutral, at least on the surface. “Moral neutrality is a capital sin,” he states.

Inside, artworks cover nearly every inch of office wallspace, including the staff toilets. It can come across a little starry-eyed at times. A mural of Samuel Beckett quotes greets a welcome in the carpark, and in the reception hangs an enormous painting of a Last Supper scene, casting several of the group’s employees as disciples. An outdoor installation that serves as a prayer space broadcasts meditative clanging sounds of people cheerfully busy in the factories, while donkeys graze happily nearby monumental sculptures, a metaphor, surely, for the unyoked worker. 

“We know that utilitarians, advocates of maximising the common good, would always find alternative ways to allocate resources instead of investing in art and culture,” Teixeira declared in a press conference on 21 April. “Yet we also know, as Victor Hugo said, that ignorance is worse than poverty."

Nonetheless, if this is all a form of propaganda for the spiritual rewards that await the noble labourer, an oversized PR masterplan, or an indulgent Renaissance intellectual exercise, it’s refreshing to see a corporation acknowledge that art’s economic power extends far beyond simple asset appreciation or tax relief solutions.

Anselm Kiefer, SOL INVICTUS Helioglobal, 2023 (installation view, MUZEU). Photo: Hugo Delgado. Courtesy MUZEU

The DST Group now wants to bring contemporary art to Braga’s 200,000 residents, and on 25 April opened the city’s first contemporary art institution, MUZEU – Thought & Contemporary Art at dst, housing its collection, which includes artists such as André Butzer, Nan Goldin, Alex Katz, Julião Sarmento, Anselm Kiefer, Helena Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis and Rui Chafes. The programme will be overseen by Helena Mendes Pereira, who also serves as the director of Zet, a commercial gallery Teixeira owns with spaces in Braga and Lisbon. The opening date holds special significance, marking the anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, which saw Europe’s then longest-standing dictatorship overthrown by a nearly bloodless coup, and ultimately led to the decolonisation of Lusophone Africa. It earned its name from the red flowers placed in the muzzles of rifles as a symbol of peace. 

Designed by the local architect José Carvalho Araújo for a cost of €40 million, the five-storey MUZEU was a courthouse in its previous life. But if calm and order are expected in court, it’s not what Teixeira has in mind. “Art does not exist, nor do workers or people, to be obedient,” he tells The Art Journal. Just as well, given that Teixeira and Braga’s new mayor, João Rodrigues, were heckled on the street by a disgruntled passerby during the unveiling of Julian Opie’s outdoor LED animation, Saturday night couple 2 (2026). Regrettably, a translation of the elderly woman’s interruption was not available for the non-Portuguese speakers among the group. Maybe she felt the mayor’s time would be better spent elsewhere. Maybe she’s not an Opie fan.

Sandra Baía, Fragments on a Wall, 2022-2023, 10 aluminium elements, paint and flocking, 390 x 1000 cm. Photo: João Neves. Courtesy MUZEU

The opening comes at an interesting time for Portugal and its self-image, following February’s election of a new socialist president, António José Seguro, who secured a landslide victory against the far-right populist André Ventura, founder of Chega, the main parliamentary opposition party. With the nation experiencing its greatest political upheaval in decades (May 2025 saw its third general election in three years), the new president will face the crucial task of restoring stability. Last year, the government allocated €597.3 million to culture, and has committed to double its budget by 2028. Nonetheless, at MUZEU’s inauguration, Seguro spoke at length of ‘the social responsibility of wealth’, pressing more of the rich to step up as cultural patrons, declaring it their ‘moral obligation’.

Teixeira already knows this view won’t go down well among his peers. “I’m the ugly duckling, the odd one out in the Portuguese economy,” he tells The Art Journal. “But collective imagination [can] overcome those ‘Adamastors’,” he adds, referring to the daunting mythological sea giants invented by 16th century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões by way of metaphor. A few miles away from the bustle of first-time museum visitors in the city centre, macho construction workers are taking their break in a busy cafeteria. On each table sits a carnation in a bud vase.