Belgium and the art world were shocked when, on 29 March, Baroness Myriam Ullens de Schooten, aged 70, was fatally wounded by several gunshots while parked in her car in Brussels. Her husband Guy Ullens de Schooten, aged 88, who was also in the car, suffered injuries and was taken to the hospital.
As several Belgian media reported, the perpetrator is said to be Myriam Ullens' stepson, Nicolas Ullens, who turned himself in to the police the next day. His motive was allegedly over Guy Ullens' fortune, which Nicolas believed had been squandered by his second wife Myriam.
Born in Cologne in 1952, Myriam married the Belgian entrepreneur Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnall in 1999. It was the second marriage for both of them. After their marriage, Myriam gave up her own business to devote herself to charitable projects, such as founding a school in Lalitpur, Nepal. After surviving breast cancer herself, Myriam founded the Mimi Ullens Foundation, which provides psychological support to cancer patients.
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Together with Guy, who has been collecting Chinese art since the early 1980s, Myriam founded the Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation and sponsored the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing in 2007, which was the first private museum for contemporary Chinese art. Ten years after its founding, Myriam and Guy handed the museum over to China-based investors as the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
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On 30 March, UCCA issued a press release on the tragic death of its founder, in which Director Philip Tinari stated, "The vision and passion of Myriam Ullens — her love for art, belief in cultural exchange, and commitment to helping others — are at the core of UCCA’s history and values. We are shocked and saddened by her death, and will remember her strength, style, creativity, and generosity as we carry forward the work of the institution that she and Guy so generously founded and nurtured through its first decade."
![Edmond Lachenal & J. Costet, Juno, decorative ceramic motif with decoration of the goddess Juno, signed [detail]. Photo © Rossini](https://images.prismic.io/barnebys/6869c5f6-9c84-47b6-aaa4-afc0103070ec_Cover.jpeg?auto=format,compress)
