Practice · Foundations and legacy

A trust, a foundation and a gift to a museum answer different questions.

ArtisDomus, the practice of Polina Surina, advises on succession for artists’ estates, on whether a foundation is feasible, and on partnerships with institutions. It works in Paris, Malta, the United Kingdom, Qatar and the Gulf, and only the owner pays its fee. The purpose comes first and the legal structure follows. A lawyer can draft something worth signing only once the purpose is written down.

Published by ArtisDomus, written by Polina Surina.

A trust, a foundation, a company limited by guarantee and a gift to a museum each answer a different question. Pick one before the questions are settled, and the family gets a structure that is expensive to run and does not do what it wanted.

01/05

Pl. 01 Eliška Konečná. No Petal Left to Pluck, 2025. Embroidery, cotton and wooden frame, 220 × 150 × 8 cm. Detail.

The question

The founder is gone and the board does not know what the collection is for.

This question comes in two forms. An artist has died, and the estate holds the work, the archive, the copyright and a house. Or a collector has died, and a foundation now owns objects that one person gathered over forty years without writing down why.

Both cases have the same problem. One person built the collection on their own judgement, and now a committee runs it. Nobody recorded that judgement in a form the committee can use. A board can approve a budget. It cannot recreate a person’s taste.

So the work starts with a written statement. It says what the collection is for, which institutions it belongs beside, and what it must not become. Once that statement exists, choosing the legal structure is a job for a lawyer.

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Method

The thesis must outlast the person whose taste it records.

Read the owner and the place. Who owns it, who it is for, and which people will be in the room.
Map the field. Museums, foundations, collectors, galleries and artists who can carry the project.
Write the thesis. What the collection has to say, and what has to be excluded in order to say it.
Place each work. Every work has a position and a stated reason for that position.
Programme and activate. A collection earns its keep through what happens around it.

Here the third step matters most. For a living collector, the thesis guides what to buy. For an estate or a foundation, its job is harder. People who never met the artist or collector must be able to read it, and it must keep working after that person is gone.

The practice takes no commission from galleries and keeps no discounts. Any terms it negotiates for the owner pass to the owner in full and are disclosed in writing.

03/05

Discretion

Estates and foundations are the most private work the practice does.

The practice publishes nothing about a family without written permission for that engagement.

The reference library explains the method. One entry covers what happens to a collection when its owner dies, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Another explains a term that can cut the assessed value of a large holding of one artist’s work by half.

What happens to an art collection when the collector dies

Blockage discount

04/05

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