The Ellipse Foundation opened in October 2006, having been established in 2004 and largely financed by the collector Dr João Oliveira-Rendeiro, chairman of Lisbon’s Banco Privado, along with a group of 20 other collector/investors hailing from Portugal, Spain and Brazil. The shopping list, however, is chiefly in the hands of Pedro Lapa, Alexandre Melo and Manuel Gonzalez, the three curators brought on board to spend the investors’ millions. And they’ve splurged on contemporary art’s biggest stars: Gabriel Orozco, Mona Hatoum, Jeff Wall, Thomas Hirschhorn, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Rodney Graham,Thomas Scheibitz, Richard Prince, Jimmie Durham, along with a hearty dose of Portuguese artists. This collection feels a bit sprawling and unfocused, but the curators are happy to admit that it is not about a specific strand of contemporary art. Only when you visit the foundation – a 20,000 square-foot space that looks like a black bunker across the road from a BMW dealership in an industrial park on the outskirts of sleepy resort town Cascais – you may wonder about purpose of it. “I want to create a major collection for Portugal and put Portugal and Cascais on the international scene”, says Rindeiro-Oliveiro, stating his worthy ambition.