The curator Tracy Cooper-Lavery’s cold call to a contact at the Mugrabi Collection is well documented online. As the Director of Australia’s newish gallery HOTA, she was so obsessed with its works (reputedly worth more than $5 billion) that she was determined to show them Down Under.

The result is 2023’s Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York, which includes more than 50 works from 15 key artists. Among them are Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, KAWS, Katherine Bernhardt and Mickalene Thomas.

The works are reflective of the wider collection, which acts like a visual Who’s Who of the industry spanning six decades.

It was with a 1988 purchase of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (Twenty Times) that the collection began to take shape. Now, the Mugrabis (dad José and his two sons) are regarded by some as the most influential collectors in the world, renowned in auction houses and friends with industry power houses including gallerist Larry Gagosian. As the New York Times puts it, “for the Mugrabis’ preferred artists, the family doesn’t merely operate in the art market; it is the market”.

Though HOTA’s exhibition is the largest of works from the collection to date, pieces also have been lent to other institutions for exhibitions echoing its narrative – the Whitney’s Warhol retrospective or the Barbican’s famed Boom For Real for example.