Dakis Joannou born 1941 is a Greek Cypriot

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

 industrialist and art collector based in Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

. He owns hotels and a construction business and has been a major international distributor of Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...

 "across 27 countries, from Greece to Switzerland to Russia to Nigeria."

Life and career

Joannou is considered to be one of the leading collectors of European contemporary art in Greece (the earliest collections date back to the 1980s), including works such as the Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

 sculpture One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985).

Artistis included in the collection

The Dakis Joanou collection includes works by a variety of international and mainstream artists, including:

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

, Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Lassry received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2007.- Life and career :...

, Mike Kelley, Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....

, Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...

, Cady Noland

Cady Noland

Cady Noland is a conceptual sculptor and an internationally exhibited installation artist, whose work deals with the failed promise of the American Dream and the divide between fame and anonymity among other themes. Her work has been exhibited in museums and expositions including the Whitney...

, Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...

, Michael Bevilacqua, Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton is a contemporary artist living in Bali. A mixed-media artist, Bickerton often combines both photographic and painterly elements with industrial and found object assemblages...

, Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese contemporary artist and curator.-Biography:Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged...

, Matt Greene

Matt Greene

Matt Greene is an American professional ice hockey defenseman who currently plays for the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League. Greene currently serves as an alternate captain for Los Angeles.-Edmonton Oilers:...

, Liza Lou

Liza Lou

Liza Lou is an American visual artist best known for producing large-scale work in unlikely and tedious mediums, such as beads.Lou came to prominence with the work "Kitchen" , a to-scale and fully equipped replica of a kitchen covered in beads...

, Miltos Manetas

Miltos Manetas

Miltos Manetas is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in HighgateManetas has created Internet Art as well as paintings of cables, computers, video games and Internet websites. His work has been collected by Charles Saatchi...

, Allan McCollum

Allan McCollum

Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who was born in Los Angeles, California in 1944, and now lives and works in New York City. He has spent over forty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production, focusing most recently on...

, Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami

is an internationally prolific contemporary Japanese artist. He works in fine arts media—such as painting and sculpture—as well as what is conventionally considered commercial media —fashion, merchandise, and animation— and is known for blurring the line between high and low art...

, Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...

, Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili is a Turner Prize winning British painter best known for artworks referencing aspects of his Nigerian heritage, particularly his incorporation of elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists, and is now based in Trinidad.-Early life:Ofilli was born in Manchester. He had a...

, Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist, who in 1998 was called "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984. He then continued his education...

, Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, is a British-Nigerian artist living in the UK. He readily acknowledges physical disability as part of his identity but creates work in which this is just one strand of a far richer weave.-Life and career:...

, Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander is an artist from Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Sikander is a Pakistani American artist, now living in New York City, who specializes in Mughal miniature painting and Persian miniature painting. She has also created murals, installations, mixed-media works and performance art. She...

, Kara Walker

Kara Walker

Kara Walker is a contemporary African American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes, such as The Means to an End--A Shadow Drama in Five Acts.-Biography:Walker was born in...

, Nari Ward

Nari Ward

Nari Ward is an artist based in New York. Nari Ward received a BA from Hunter College, CUNY in 1991 and a MFA from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1992...

, and Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is an American artist residing in New York City. Since the 1980s, Wool's studio practice has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas - moving beyond theoretical readings...

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Recognition

Joannou's collection has been featured in many leading museums, in 2002 at the Palais de Tokyo

Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, near the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs the City of Paris and hosts the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris...

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, and in 2010 at the New Museum in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

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Deste Foundation

Joannou is the founder of Deste Foundation

Deste Foundation

Deste Foundation or Deste Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art is an arts foundation in Athens, Greece. Housing the massive collection of Greek businessman Dakis Joannou, it organizes exhibitions by emerging and established international contemporary artists...

, center for contemporary arts, located in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

, in the suburb of Nea Ionia. DESTE is a nonprofit foundation that organises exhibitions and supports publications that explore the relationship between contemporary art and contemporary culture. It aims to bring contemporary art to a wider audience, to enhance opportunities for young artists, and to establish a dialogue between generations through an exhibition program that promotes emerging as well as established artists.

Joannou was ranked 28 in ArtReview's guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art: Power 100, 2010.