The Artist Pension Trust Promised Security. What Went Wrong?

When Jane Wilson signed up to the Artist Pension Trust's London pool in 2006, her son was just over a year old. 

Jane and her sister Louise, who also works as her artistic collaborator, came to prominence with their exhibition Gamma, which was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999. Shortly before joining the Artist Pension Trust (ATP), they had decided to leave Lisson Gallery and were seeking new representation.

What APT offered the creative duo – secure, professional storage for their work and a long-term pension alongside it – “seemed both thoughtful and reassuring,” Jane says. “It genuinely felt like a lifeline.”

The problem APT promised to solve needed little explanation in the artworld. “No self-employed artist has a pension,” says Louise. “Unless they're paying into a pension fund directly.” 

But the Wilsons, who work across film, photography and sculpture, did not just join because of the potential financial reward. The people behind the scheme appealed to them. A trusted ‘liaison’ had already brought other artist friends on board and the prospect of being part of a community was attractive.

Their commitment to a scheme based on good faith runs through the accounts of all six artists The Art Journal interviewed for this piece. As Jane puts it: “We believed we were entering into a relationship built on trust and mutual benefit, and we committed significant works to the programme on that basis.”

The Wilsons are not outliers. On 28 July of this year, they put their names to a letter addressed to APT that demanded the return of the works they deposited with the scheme.

The letter contains the signatures of 35 other artists from APT's London pool and beyond. The signatories include Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004, and six other artists who have been shortlisted for it: Simon Patterson (1996), Goshka Macuga (2008), Lucy Skaer (2009), Luke Fowler (2012), Ciara Phillips (2014) and Rosalind Nashashibi (2017). Artists of the calibre of Ryan Gander, Céline Condorelli, Haroon Mirza, Brian Griffiths and Vlatka Horvat have also put their names on the letter.

This is a story about what happened to some of the most celebrated artists of their generation after they committed to a scheme devised by people they had every reason to trust.

What Was Promised

APT was founded in 2004 by technology entrepreneur Moti Shniberg, finance professor Dan Galai and David A. Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

The premise was simple. Over the course of 20 years, artists would deposit 20 works into one of a number of regional ‘pools’. APT pledged to store, insure, exhibit and lend the works before selling them on the market at the right moment, ensuring the creators of the work benefited financially. 

Proceeds would be split three ways: 40 percent to the artist whose work sold, 32 percent into a shared pool for everyone in that trust, and 28 percent to APT for running it.

“We were signed up by the cream of the artworld,” says the photographer Dan Holdsworth, who joined APT in 2006. In his case, that was Kay Pallister, then director of APT London, who was later joined by the curator Gerrie van Noord. “It was done on trust,” he says. “The artworld operated very much on mutual relationships and acquaintances, friendships and working relationships built up over years.”

APT’s advisory board, as reported at the time of its international expansion, included figures who lent it considerable artworld standing – among them Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery, the artist John Baldessari and Lady Elena Foster, then chair of Tate’s International Council.

Pallister made the pitch at the London launch. Artists sell everything early, she told a BBC programme in April 2005, and ‘those formative works are re-sold for 50 times that amount without the artist seeing a penny of that appreciation’. The trust would let artists benefit from that appreciation rather than the ‘canny speculative collectors’. The works, the BBC reported, ‘will still be available for viewing, lending and showing’.

What appealed to Holdsworth was the opportunity to invest collectively with other artists he respected. “It appeared to be a cooperative of artists," he says. "Something that was a powerful thing in the name of artists.” Creatives in his profession, he says, often have little control over their own careers: “Galleries are the means for making your living, and they control artists’ careers. It seemed like a nice way of having more agency.”

There were no guarantees that the scheme would work. “It wasn’t a given,” he says. But he was told what would happen if it didn't. “It was said at the time by Kay, in good faith of course, that if it didn't work out – what's the worst that would happen? We would just get our work back.”

Céline Condorelli joined the London pool in 2013, but not before interrogating the contract. “This was one of my main questions: what happens if it doesn't work?" she says. "What happens if it doesn't work after five years? What happens if it doesn't work after 20 years?” Her reading is unequivocal: “Should APT London cease to exist, then the works automatically revert to the artist. All costs for the operation are to be the sole responsibility of APT. This is black and white.”

The contract The Art Journal has seen states that, if APT London ‘shall cease to exist as a corporate entity’ or cease to be capable of storing the work, the artworks ‘will revert to the Artist's direct ownership and control’.

APT's own roster of London participating artists as at October 2009, just five years after its founding, lists 160 names. Alongside those now demanding their works back are Douglas Gordon, David Shrigley, Richard Wright, Mike Nelson and Fiona Banner. The pool was administered from London but covered Western Europe and at that time was still recruiting towards a target of 250.

By 2016, APT had merged into MutualArt, a company Shniberg had also founded. MutualArt is named in the termination agreement the artists are now being asked to sign as the London pool is shuttered. Shniberg was invited to comment by The Art Journal through the lawyer administering that process, but did not respond.

Vortex Drawing (2013) by Graham Gussin. Pen on paper. 2009 Silver form is a series of 6 photographic works, APT are in possession of numbers 1-10.

Twenty Years Later

Not one of the six London pool artists interviewed by The Art Journal has ever received a payment from APT. Not one has been sent a valuation, an annual statement or a recent condition report. Not one was consulted about a potential sale of their work.

APT made one publicly announced distribution in its history. In July 2016, more than 400 artists in the New York and Los Angeles trusts received between US$200 and US$1,700 each, after more than 20 works sold for a total of US$452,085. There has never been a distribution to the London pool.

There were loans in the early years. APT lent works from its collection to an exhibition of Dan Holdsworth's in Geneva around 2007. Louise Wilson says nothing of theirs was ever exhibited or lent to her knowledge. When 's works were shown, it was because she borrowed them back herself – through a formal loan request to APT, and for an administrative fee – for exhibitions in Leipzig in 2018 and Switzerland in 2019.

As time went on and “the serious, knowledgeable people involved subsequently left the organisation”, Holdsworth says, “There was a very quick turnover of people. Over time, the relationship with APT was lost and there was less and less communication from them.” Happening to go on APT's website one day, Holdsworth noticed that five of his works were marked as out on loan. Weeks after he asked where they were, Holdsworth was told they had been lent to the Candy Brothers and hung in the property developers' Mayfair offices. ‘It looks great,’ he says he was told. ‘I've been meaning to tell you about this.’

Care of the works became a chief concern. Haroon Mirza, who won the Silver Lion for a promising young artist at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, watched one of his pieces leave his studio in the back of a truck, uncrated. “I was just staring at it, leaving, thinking: ‘That doesn't look safe.’” After that incident, he deliberately deposited smaller, less fragile works.

Graham Gussin, now an associate professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, describes a collection from his studio by “a man in a van”, with no consignment note and no condition check. “He just put the work in the back,” he says. “He didn’t even tie it down.” He stopped depositing works soon afterwards. “I thought: ‘Fuck, this is getting really weird’. Then I got in touch with the other artists," he says. "They had all had the same experience.”

In 2017, the Wilsons discovered that works of theirs had been put up for auction via a link on the MutualArt website. Nobody had told them about the event, titled ‘An Auction to Benefit Artists: Works from the APT Collection’, held at Sotheby's London. They objected in writing to four named executives: Saul Ingram, APT's head of sales; Shai Feingold, general counsel and chief financial officer of MutualArt; Al Brenner, chief executive of both APT and MutualArt and Hannah Conroy, APT's regional director for Europe. Eighteen lots from APT London artists were withdrawn from the auction.

That December, the Wilsons arranged a visit to see their work through APT's then regional director for Europe, Lassla Esquivel. They expected to find a professional art store. On arrival at an industrial estate in Barking, east London, they found a warehouse where works weren’t being held in purpose-built racks. “It looked like the work had been quite badly manhandled,” Louise says. Only a handful of pieces were unwrapped. Jane says all of them appeared damaged, including two large photographic works in Perspex box frames. They asked for condition reports on everything of theirs in the building. Nearly nine years on, they are still waiting.

Holdsworth gave APT 12 framed photographs, including the second edition of his triptych Black Mountains (2001); the first edition was sold to Alexander McQueen. “I really entrusted them good works,” he says, adding that their production costs alone would be at least £35,000 today. He supplied a gallery price for each work when they were deposited but says APT checked whether the prices had changed only once, around two years later.

Condorelli likewise says the values recorded for her six works between 2013 and 2016 were never updated. Her sculptural installation The Double and the Half (to Avery Gordon) (2014), commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and since shown in several European museums, was entered at £9,000. She would insure it today at £25,000 to £30,000.

Those original valuations now govern the termination agreement, despite a contractual requirement for reviews every two years. “The whole point of their scheme was that the value of artists' works goes up and down and up and down,” Holdsworth says. “And yet now they're saying each artwork has this fixed price, which is the price at which the artists invested their works in the first place.”

Céline Condorelli bau bau, 2014. Installation view GfZK Leipzig. Photograph by Johannes Ernst

The Move to Leipzig

After years of strain, the relationship between APT London and the artists in its pool finally broke in 2017. Without warning, APT announced a sales policy under which artists would be charged storage fees. The London store was closing, they said, and work would now be moved to Leipzig in the east of Germany. The artists were asked to sign a new contract. Mirza says the group refused: “We said, we don’t want our work to be taken to Leipzig. And they did it anyway.”

The only way APT would allow works to stay in the UK was if they were stored by the artists at their own expense; APT would retain the right to sell them. Condorelli refused. In an email The Art Journal has seen, she told APT she had ‘no capacity, no want and no possibility’ for storing works in which APT retained an interest.

What she wanted was everything back, after a condition check, with no further demands. Esquivel told her that ‘leaving the trust is not an option’. On 16 January 2018, she wrote that works not consigned to artists for storage would be moved to Leipzig within days. ‘I appreciate this is not what you requested or wish,’ she wrote, ‘but unfortunately works can't be released without this document completed.’

Condorelli says her works were being moved out of the country against her wishes while their return remained conditional on her signing a new agreement. When she wrote again that August to ask whether her works were in Leipzig or London, APT general counsel Shai Feingold forwarded her message to Artist Relations. She heard nothing substantive back.

In 2018, 33 London pool artists instructed the law firm Howard Kennedy and complained to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that APT London had been promoted and operated as an illegal collective investment scheme. The FCA said at the time that it was considering the matter, but has offered no public determination in the eight years since. 

The Termination Offer

This spring, APT wrote to its London artists to say it was winding up their pool, attaching an agreement to sign electronically. Its terms have not previously been published – in part because anyone who signs is barred from disclosing them, with any remaining claim against APT at risk if they do.

Artists are asked to give up 30 percent of their works by value, calculated using valuations recorded when the works were deposited, in some cases 20 years ago. If the works returned to an artist exceed 75 percent of their deposited value, the difference becomes a debt to APT, repayable from future sales. Artists must pay to retrieve works from Leipzig or may pay to have them destroyed. Anything uncollected within six months becomes APT's property. Signing also releases all claims against APT and MutualArt.

Louise Wilson says the artists cannot meaningfully discuss percentages without knowing what condition the works are in. “It may be that 70 percent of the work is damaged, so then what are we talking about?” she says. “How could you even know without having a condition report, or knowing where they are, or what state?” 

“It's a huge scale of appropriation that is being attempted here,” Condorelli says. “Even if they just keep 30 percent of the work, this would be what I would call theft on an enormous scale.”

APT's justification is cost. The 70/30 split, it told the group on 18 August, is "intended to provide the practical means of covering the substantial storage, administration, handling and logistics costs" of closing the pools. The structure, it had said in July, "is the result of long-term discussions with US attorneys who represented a large group of artists", and is being applied to the London pool "to ensure a fair and consistent approach for all global members". Those discussions concerned APT’s US pools in New York and Los Angeles. The London artists' answer is that their contracts put every cost of the programme on APT London – which is also what APT's own 2006 letter to artists promised, when it undertook to "entirely assume all costs".

Black Mountains (2001) by Dan Holdsworth.

Triptych (1st edition collected by Alexander McQueen, 2nd edition held by APT) Courtesy of the artist.

Where Are the Works?

When the termination agreement arrived, artists began asking APT for inventories. The inventory APT sent Graham Gussin listed three of his works as being held by a London art-handling firm called Dore to Door. Their reply to him, seen by The Art Journal, said: ‘Unfortunately the name APT doesn’t mean anything to us,’ and that they did not believe they held his work.

Holdsworth's inventory listed three of his works at the same firm. He called too. According to Holdsworth, he was told: “No, haven't heard of your name, haven't seen these artworks, haven't heard of MutualArt, haven't heard of Artist Pension Trust.”

APT's own account is less certain than the inventories suggested. In a letter to the London group on 18 August, it said the works were "principally" stored at its Leipzig facility – a word that leaves open the question of where the rest might be – and that it was "currently reconciling the inventory". It came more than four months after APT had asked artists to sign an agreement requiring each of them to rank their works, in order of preference, from a spreadsheet APT would prepare.

Condorelli is the only London pool artist interviewed for this article who has seen the building where she says the London pool artists’ work is held, on the grounds of the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, a ten-hectare former cotton mill complex that now houses galleries and artists’ studios. In 2018, technicians working with her collected three of her works from the facility for a museum survey show in which she was exhibiting. The works returned to Leipzig after the show’s end. They were borrowed again in 2019. Condorelli's last condition report for any of hers dates from 2018, when the museum sent them back.

“This is no secret,” she says. “This is one of APT's major storages, and has always been.” As far as she understands it, APT ultimately consolidated both the London and Berlin pools there.

When the termination agreement arrived, Condorelli asked contacts in Leipzig whether years of unpaid storage charges might now fall to the artists. She was told the rent was being paid. 

Every email the artists have received since the termination agreement was issued is signed ‘APT’ – no name, no title. “There is somebody paying rent on a massive storage,” Condorelli says, “and there is somebody who obviously physically is opening the door or not opening the door, and getting lawyers and appointing lawyers and paying lawyers.”

Trying to reach them, she says, is like arguing with a wall. “Who is APT? No one is taking responsibility, and nobody's speaking on behalf of APT.”

The Dissolved Company

There is another problem. The entity named as the artists’ counterparty to the termination agreement is APT London Inc.

According to the Registry of Corporate Affairs of the British Virgin Islands, APT London Inc. was struck off in 2015 for nonpayment of annual fees and dissolved on 2 November 2022. Nobody told the artists.

The artists believe this event should have triggered the contractual clause returning their works to them. APT does not. In a letter to the group on 30 July, which The Art Journal has seen, it said the clause ‘must be viewed within the full context’. APT had continued to store the works ‘at its own expense’, it said, and because they remained ‘safely stored and under active management’, reversion did not apply. At no point in correspondence has APT disputed that the company no longer exists.

So then, which legal entity now stands in place of APT London Inc.? The Art Journal put that question to Guillermo Malm Green, the Argentine lawyer administering APT's winding up — one of 27 questions put to him, including which entity an artist contracts with by signing the termination agreement, how many London artists have signed, and where their works are. In a brief reply, he referred The Art Journal to earlier coverage in The New York Times and The Financial Times and said: "APT's team is in direct contact with the artists or their representatives, focused on smoothly and quickly returning the works to them." He did not respond to a follow-up email.

Haroon Mirza, The national apavilion of then and now, 2011. Courtesy of Haroon Mirza and Lisson Gallery / The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Regulator

The artists have been asking another question since 2018: should APT ever have been operating this way in the first place?

That year, 33 London pool members instructed Howard Kennedy to raise the matter with the FCA, arguing that APT met the statutory definition of a collective investment scheme – one in which participants share in the profits from pooled property they do not control day to day – and that promoting and operating such a scheme without FCA authorisation is unlawful. APT disputes this.

Malm Green told the Financial Times in July that APT's submissions to the FCA had, in his words, "demonstrated" that it was not a collective investment scheme, and that this "was clearly conveyed to the FCA and was never rejected".

Eight years after the artists first complained, when asked directly by The Art Journal, the FCA will not say whether it ever reached a determination. It neither confirms nor denies investigations — and its published guidance puts plainly that where it cannot confirm one, it cannot deny one either. The silence Malm Green cites is therefore one the regulator would maintain whether or not it had ever formed a view.

The FCA did give The Art Journal this statement: “We have every sympathy for artists who have lost out in the trust's collapse. The Artist Pension Trust wasn't regulated by the FCA and, from what we understand, was run from outside the UK. We can only act where we have powers and the legal basis to do so.”

When the Financial Times reported the collapse this July, it commented on social media posts: ‘Whether you're an artist or anyone else, when it comes to innovative financial schemes, it pays to be cautious.’

The Howard Kennedy lawyer Jon Sharples rejects that framing. “It's too easy with the benefit of hindsight to blame victims of wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoers," he says. "We have regulation to protect retail investors for a reason, and the APT artists have been badly let down by the FCA's inaction.”

Where They Now Stand

In June of this year, 38 artists signed a collective letter to APT. Since then, the group has grown to just shy of 50. On 16 September, they wrote to APT again.

The letter, which The Art Journal has seen, notes that APT has confirmed only that the works are “principally” in Leipzig, provided neither an inventory nor a breakdown of costs, still has not identified the legal entity that would stand behind the termination agreement and has not engaged with the regulatory questions raised by the artists' lawyers.

It points out that APT has, in at least one case, told a London pool artist that the 70/30 split would not apply, and rejects in advance any storage or penalty fees — charges APT told artists in another of its pools it will begin levying on those who do not sign. The letter gives APT 14 days to confirm it will return all the works, at its own expense, under the original contracts. APT has until 30 September to respond. As this piece was published, it had not provided a reply to the artists in question.

At the start of August, representatives met with the Art Loss Register (ALR), the due-diligence provider that maintains the world's largest private database of stolen art. The ALR has agreed to list the works as ‘in dispute’ – a flag that warns auction houses and dealers to check before a sale. Each artist must register individually; Haroon Mirza has now lodged his paperwork, and others are following. On the ALR’s advice, some intend to report the works to the police to obtain a crime reference number.

A few have signed the termination agreement. At least one has got work back. Others have signed and received nothing yet. None of the artists The Art Journal spoke to for this piece can quite establish how many have done either. APT says otherwise. "Many London artists have confirmed the arrangement," it told the group in July; by August the framework had been "accepted by hundreds of artists in this and other pools". It has not said how many of those are in London.

“It's not because they're ignorant,” Condorelli says of those who sign. “It's because they can't take it anymore. They're exhausted and they're in despair.”

Sharples says efforts are continuing to push the FCA for a determination, including by escalating the matter to Lucy Rigby, the UK member of parliament who was recently reappointed as economic secretary to the Treasury, with oversight of the FCA. Sharples says: “One consequence of such a determination is that the contracts underpinning an illegal scheme cannot be enforced against its participants.”

“It’s really distressing,” says Holdsworth. “Some artists have died during this process without ever seeing their artworks again. Obviously, none of them received any money. Some artists are now quite elderly.”

He hopes that, on hearing their stories, people in the art establishment will come out to defend the artist pool against APT London Inc. “They’ll get away with it if people don’t speak out,” he says.

In June last year, the Wilsons showed a selection of their early-career works at 303 Gallery in New York – pieces their own gallery had held in storage for two decades. They came out in excellent condition, beautifully cared for.

“It was really quite emotional,” Louise says. “You felt the real investment of what gallery support could look like.”

Jane's son was just over a year old when she signed. “Now that little baby is nineteen. But he needs looking after still,” Louise says. “He’s about to go to university, so it's a difficult time.” He starts a philosophy degree this autumn.

The pension meant to help her look after him has cost her far more than it ever could have paid.