Art as a Meaningful Investment to Viktor Havelec

Viktor was given his first painting as a gift, shortly after the walls of his apartment started looking too empty to him. He was accustomed, from childhood, to the household always being decorated with paintings. “Later, my wife and I bought another work at auction, and that’s how it started. I just wanted to look at something nice and at the same time feel that I had spent money in some meaningful way,” says Viktor in explaining his early days as a collector.

He accumulated plenty of knowledge over the course of two years, much of it from the EduArt Start programme for aspiring collectors. As part of the programme, he visited galleries, auction houses, and artists’ studios together with other “students” and became actively interested in collecting. “When it comes to art, I’m certainly a little wiser than I was before. But the truth is that every time I want to buy a painting, I discuss it with Barbara Půlpánová at EduArt Experience first,” admits Viktor.

When buying, Viktor always follows certain rules: for example, he does not buy more than one piece of an artist’s work from the same period. In building his collection, he tries to find a balance between artists in the early stages of their career and those who are already found in prominent Czech collections. Any piece of work that he plans to buy must be visually appealing to him, but must at the same time make at least some sort of economic sense. “When I see an indication of some future increase in the value of a work, this is a signal to me that such an acquisition is reasonable. I need to know that if anything were to happen, I would be able to sell the paintings without any trouble and get my money back,” explains Viktor.

He is not planning to sell any of his paintings right now, one reason being that he sees investing in art as a relatively stable way of depositing money over the long-term. His aim is to create a meaningful collection of contemporary Czech art. “At the pace we are moving, I reckon we could have dozens of works in the collection within a few years,” concludes Viktor.