La maison rouge welcomes in 2006 this first-ever showing of the Sylvio Perlstein collection, in all its vastness and diversity. An Antwerp jeweller and diamond merchant, Sylvio Perlstein grew up in Brazil before settling in Belgium in the 1960s, travelling constantly, as he still does, between Europe and the United States. He devotes all his free time and energy to meeting artists and buying works for which most of the time, in his own words, “without really knowing what they are, sometimes even if it is actually art…” Attentive and open to diversity as much in forms of expression as the media used, he is equally passionate about Dada, surrealism, minimalism, conceptual art, 1960s Belgian art, New Realism, Arte Povera, photography from the 1920s to today, and contemporary art.