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 most famous hotels in the world in its portfolio, started to bring contemporary artists into a number of its properties in 2022 through the MITICO program organized, in collaboration with Galleria Continua. Previous artists who have taken part in the program include Arcangelo Sassolino and Subodh Gupta. This year, for the first time, just one artist, Daniel Buren, is creating works across six of the Belmond properties, including Villa San Michele in Tuscany, Mount Nelson in Cape Town, Copacabana Beach Hotel in Rio de Janeiro and - most recently - the Hotel Cipriani in Venice.

All of them aim to change a guest or visitor’s perspective. At the Castello di Casole near Florence in Italy, Buren focuses on the landscape using black and white panels to focus on different areas of the landscape - woodland, an old farm and a 10th-century village. ‘It’s not a frame but it is a way of looking at the landscape. The Japanese word - shakei - a sense of borrowing scenery is the most appropriate,’ he says. At Villa San Michele colored panels above a bar bathe customers and guests with patterns of light.

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

Buren’s work at the Cipriani, launched in early April just before the Biennale, initially seems simple; a collection of panels in different transparent colors surrounding a small fountain at the entrance. ‘It is a little fountain in a huge hotel,’ he says. ‘I watched as adults walked past it, but children were drawn to it. Children always find the most interesting things.’

Buren is no stranger to Venice - he won the Golden Lion at the 1986 Biennale. Much of his work has been created in places of transit. In 2017, he created an artwork in the ticket hall of London’s Tottenham Court Road underground station.

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

Belmond’s MITICO program falls between public and gallery art. Yes, for a guest to be able to experience the art at different times and at leisure, will always be a huge privilege but as part of Buren’s MITICO project at the Hotel Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, he has created colored panels for the windows across the hotel's white 1920s facade. ‘I did not think that the hotel would allow it,’ says Buren but it’s a striking artistic statement and one that impacts both those on the beach, who can see the installation in its entirety and guests. ‘People staying in the hotel activate them by switching on lights, so they are taking part too.’