At precisely 5:45 AM, while most of Berlin still lies under the hush of sleep, Dr. Margot Ellingsen is already awake, wrapped in a Japanese wool haori, sipping lapsang souchong from a Bauhaus-era porcelain cup. The tea is not incidental. “The smoke, the history,” she once said in an interview for Frieze, “It prepares the mind for sharp looking.”
Margot is not what the art world usually expects from a collector. Trained originally as a neuroscientist at Milton Keynes before turning to curatorial theory at the Courtauld Institute, she is a figure who merges empirical discipline with aesthetic instinct. Her work today straddles two roles: she is Director of Acquisitions at the Zeitspiegel Ruhr Stiftung—a progressive, Berlin-based private foundation dedicated to preserving overlooked modernist art from the Global South—and a private collector of esoteric interwar abstraction.
Her own collection is modest in size, by global standards—just under 160 works—but ferociously curated. Her focus? Forgotten artists of the early 20th century who operated in peripheral geographies: Lithuanian Suprematists, Egyptian Futurists, Chilean Constructivists. “I’m not interested in greatness,” she says. “I’m interested in rupture. In those moments when form falters, and culture tries to invent a new grammar.”
By 6:30 AM, she is in her rooftop library, which she designed herself: concrete walls softened by Eileen Gray rugs and shelves lined with books in English, German, Arabic, and Portuguese. She reads for two hours each morning—criticism, journals, artist letters—annotating with a near-medical precision. “You don’t collect with your eyes,” she insists, “you collect with your thinking.”
Her workday begins not with meetings, but with studio visits. Three mornings a week, she sees young Berlin-based artists, not to buy, but to talk. “A good collector listens longer than she looks.” She takes few notes, but remembers everything. The artists, often émigrés or cross-disciplinary thinkers, refer to her half-jokingly as die Ärztin—the doctor. She rarely corrects them.
At noon, she retreats to the Stiftung headquarters in Kreuzberg, a former factory with high white walls and precise Scandinavian furniture. She reviews recent acquisitions—often unconventional media: hand-sewn political banners from 1930s Algiers, notebooks from Brazilian modernist collectives, architectural models built from salvaged copper. She works closely with a research team of five: art historians, archivists, one linguist.
Lunch, if it happens, is minimal—usually a hard cheese and seeded rye, eaten while standing in front of a small Joaquín Torres-García sketch pinned to her office corkboard. “He reminds me not to over-intellectualize. Sometimes it’s just the line.”
Afternoons vary. Twice a week, she teaches a postgraduate seminar at the Humboldt University titled “Peripheral Modernisms: A Cartography of Neglected Forms.” She hopes that she is beloved and feared by her students.
Evenings are for what she calls “deep looking.” She returns home—a converted pharmacy in Prenzlauer Berg—to spend time with her own collection. Works by Sudanese abstractionist Ibrahim el-Salahi and Polish painter Teresa Żarnower hang in quiet dialogue across her apartment walls. Lighting is dim, controlled. She believes each piece deserves a specific hour of the day. “You should meet a painting as you would meet a person. Not all at once. Not under floodlights.”
After dinner—a solitary affair accompanied by wine and Coltrane—she writes. Not publicly, not yet. But the notebooks are thick, and a publisher waits patiently. Her topics range from cave writing in early Turkish modernism to a comparative analysis of anxiety in pre-war Chilean collage. “They are not essays,” she says. “They are rehearsals for a larger honesty.”
By midnight, she has long since turned off her phone. The last hour of her day is spent in silence, seated before her most treasured piece: a 1924 ink drawing by a forgotten Lebanese abstractionist, unsigned, undated, utterly without provenance. “It has nothing to prove,” she smiles, “which is why it proves everything.”
And so the day closes—quietly, deliberately—in the life of a collector who does not chase fame, but memory. For Dr. Margot Ellingsen, collecting is not an act of accumulation, but of restoration. She does not possess artworks; she rescues them.