Outset Contemporary Art Fund is registered as a charity and funds contemporary art projects through public-private partnerships within the UK art world and across ‘chapters’ currently running in Israel, the Netherlands, Greece, Estonia, and India. It was initially founded in England in 2003 by Candida Gertler* and Yana Peel.**
Outset’s anonymous circles of Patrons and Partners are promised access to artists and the art world through annual donations which vary according to each chapter.
Outset UK and Outset Israel*** are the two longest-running chapters. Outset runs a ‘Studiomakers’ programme in both countries, working on ‘affordable’ studio provision with public and private partners, as well as funding specific projects with artists and institutions, and acquisitions for public collections. In Israel, Outset also runs an invitation-only residency programme for international artists based in a studio and flat at Candida and Zak Gertler’s Tel Aviv home.
Outset boasts that it has ‘worked with most public institutions in England.’ Across all its operations, Outset says it has raised around £16 million in the 21 years since 2003. The role it plays in actually funding art is, therefore, smaller than it appears on the surface: by scattering funds across artists and organisations and forming public-private partnerships, Outset has attempted to guarantee its position by buying our silence on its complicity in Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime astonishingly cheaply.
* Director Candida Gertler is a committee member and former trustee of British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel, which fundraises for Israeli cultural institutions including arts programmes for Israeli soldiers. She and her husband Zak Gerter are close friends of Benjamin Netanyahu and hosted his 70th birthday party at their home in Tel Aviv. Zak Gertler has donated to both Netanyahu’s political campaign and to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF continues to fund illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem . The Gertlers are both members of Tate’s International Council and major benefactors of Goldsmiths CCA, where a gallery is named after them.
Candida and Zak Gertler have also aligned themselves with right-wing politics in the UK. From 2014–2019, Candida Gertler was a director of Policy Exchange, a right-wing think-tank co-founded by Conservative politician Michael Gove and partly funded by oil and gas company Exxonmobil. Zak Gertler has personally donated at least £120,000 to Michael Gove as well as undisclosed sums through Gertler Property Services.
** Yana Peel was infamously forced to resign as CEO at the Serpentine for her financial connections to the NSO group – an Israeli spyware company whose tools allow governments to surveil journalists, lawyers, political dissidents, and human rights activists. Their Pegasus spyware has been linked to the Saudi government’s assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and has been used on Palestinian human rights campaigners.
*** Outset Israel's director Mirav Katri has posted on LinkedIn in support of the IDF and on Instagram against protests in London against the war on Gaza