Julius Baer’s commitment to innovation and creativity

In line with the Bank’s commitment to creating value beyond wealth, contemporary art is part of everyday life at Julius Baer, acting as a motivational force and encouraging an open mindset and dialogue. The questions that artists ask about today’s world and their attempts to illustrate novel aspects of our society and surroundings permeate the working world at Julius Baer, providing critical inspiration and forming an important social component of our corporate culture.

Today’s corporate collection is so unique in nature for reasons that can be traced back to the early 20th century. Collecting art has played a central role within the Baer family ever since, and art gradually began to be acquired for the Bank’s premises. It was in 1981, on the initiative of Hans J. Baer (1927–2011), that the Julius Baer Art Collection was established. Today, the Collection comprises over 5,000 works spanning a wide array of media. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, drawings and graphic arts are displayed in Julius Baer’s meeting rooms, staff restaurants, offices, foyers and corridors around the globe.

Our mission is to support artists and the visual arts in Switzerland. We take a philanthropic approach to collecting and focus on supporting artists at the beginning of their careers. From this point, we follow these artists and acquire more works as they develop their artistic practice to build an exciting and diverse corporate collection. The result is a dynamic blend of works by up-and-coming talents as well as more established artists.

Nowadays, after more than forty years of strategic collecting, the art collection provides an overview of all relevant artistic movements and developments over recent decades in the fine arts in Switzerland. The Collection features pieces by some of Switzerland’s most important contemporary artists, including John M Armleder, Silvia Bächli, Miriam Cahn, Lutz & Guggisberg, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Shirana Shahbazi and Roman Signer, to name but a few.

Giacomo Santiago Rogado (b. 1979), ‘Quelle’ (2020), mixed media on cotton, 240 x 180 cm;
Bob Gramsma (b. 1963), ‘–, OI#20260’ (2020), aluminium sand cast, 120 x 55 x 47 cm, courtesy the artists and Julius Baer Art Collection, 
photo: Véronique Hoegger