Collector's Focus: Jason Rubell

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach, David Zwirner is pleased to present a Viewing Room of works by nine artists, chosen by local Miami collector Jason Rubell. Drawings, paintings, and sculpture by gallery artists Tomma Abts, Oscar Murillo, Neo Rauch, Jason Rhoades, and Franz West are placed in dialogue with significant paintings and sculpture by Tomm El-Saieh, Aaron Fowler, Martha Jungwirth, and Kaari Upson. For Rubell, these works share a particular “power,” with “an incredible intensity, vitality, and need to exist.”

Rubell, whose family founded their world-renowned collection in 1964 and opened it to the public in 1994 in Miami, has been immersed in art his whole life.

A longtime friend of the gallery, he was excited to bring together a selection that reflects his own approach to collecting work by a wide range of international artists, from young and underseen pioneers to major masters, and his own passion for provocative, purposeful art that continues to resonate long after first view. “It’s the kind of work where it’s a real privilege that you can collect it and live with it,” Rubell says, “because your engagement with it grows as time goes on.”

For a selection of works at Art Basel Miami Beach, visit our Fair page.

Inquire about works from this past Viewing Room.

Jason Rhoades, Untitled (Chandelier), 2004, at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Aaron Fowler

Lex Brown Town, 2017

Acrylic, enamel, dirt, tire, car parts, hair weave, wood, artificial palm tree, pianos, fabric, paint tubes, backpack, graduation cap, CDs, LED rope lights, and Plexiglas on wood panels and truck topper

144 x 192 x 36 inches (365.8 x 487.7 x 91.4 cm)

American artist Aaron Fowler (b. 1988) received his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2014. A recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant in 2015, Fowler lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. The artist creates elaborate assemblage paintings from discarded objects and unconventional materials sourced from local surroundings. Taking compositional cues from American history painting and religious iconography, each work illustrates a poignant subject or event that holds significance for the artist, from portraits of incarcerated family members and friends lost in acts of violence, to imagined scenarios featuring real and fictional icons. Lex Brown Town (2017) is a portrait of the artist’s friend, the performer Lex Brown, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood.

Aaron Fowler, Lex Brown Town, 2017 (detail). Courtesy the artist, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, and M+B, Los Angeles. Photo by Erin Desmond

Jason Rhoades (1965–2006), who received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993, is known for his highly original, large-scale sculptural installations incorporating industrial and everyday materials that are inspired by Los Angeles car culture and his rural upbringing in Northern California, among other sources. Rhoades carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world, wryly subverting those conditions by integrating them within his practice. In these works, dream catchers, oriental carpets, neon signs, power cords, building materials, and his own newly fabricated products were assembled and reassembled in different configurations and enlisted as part of performances and happenings within the installations. Comprising a vertical fluorescent tube (a reference to Constantin Brancusi and Dan Flavin) and a bucket with a yellow lid, Light (1997) was originally executed in various colors for his installation Deviations in Space, VARIOUSVIRGINS, which took place at David Zwirner in New York in 1997. While he referred to Light as the “male” version of his bucket lamp works, Rhoades conceived of Inner Light (1998) as a “female” lamp, characterized by a circular fluorescent light tube installed inside the bucket.

Jason Rhoades

Light, 1997

Plastic bucket, fluorescent tubing, electrical wiring, and fluorescent light fixture

96 inches (243.8 cm) feet high

Jason Rhoades

Inner Light, 1998

Plastic bucket, fluorescent tubing, electrical wiring, fluorescent light fixture

15 x 12 x 12 inches (38.1 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)

“The Rubell Family Collection’s interest is always trying to discover artists early in their careers—that’s where we get the most energy and where we feel like we can make the biggest impact.”

—Jason Rubell

Installation view, Tomm El-Saieh: Ant’s Tits, Central Fine, Miami Beach. Image courtesy Central Fine, Miami Beach

Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Tomm El-Saieh (b. 1984) studied under seminal Haitian painters including André Pierre and at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. First Deep Dream (Ayida) (2017–2018), part of a series of monochrome paintings that explores political tension through abstraction, addresses “the urgent need for integration” via the iconographic history of Haiti’s flag, from the country’s period as a French colony to its transformation into an independent state. This year, his work was shown in the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, and in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which was accompanied by a monograph. Current presentations in Miami include a solo exhibition at Central Fine (through January 15, 2019) and a group show of new acquisitions at the Rubell Family Collection (through June 29, 2019).

Tomm El-Saieh

First Deep Dream (Ayida), 2017-2018

Acrylic on canvas

96 x 72 inches (243.8 x 182.9 cm)

Installation view, Martha Jungwirth, Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna. Photo by Silvia Ros.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2018 (on left). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

Martha Jungwirth, Portrait S, 2015–2016 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna. Photo by Rainer Iglar

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2018

Oil on cardboard on canvas

48 7/8 x 80 7/8 inches (124 x 205.5 cm)

Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth (b. 1940) graduated in 1963 from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she also taught from 1967 to 1977. In 1968, her work featured in an exhibition as part of the artist group Wirklichkeiten at the Secession in Vienna and was included in documenta 6 in 1977. Executed with dynamic brushstrokes, Jungwirth’s distinctive approach to painting in works such as Portrait S (2015–2016) embraces abstraction on the edge of the figurative. This year, the artist was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize and presented a solo exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. A solo show, titled Panta rhei, is on view at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg in Ravensburg, Germany, through February 24, 2019. Jungwirth’s work is included in public and private collections internationally. Yungwirth’s work is included in a group show of new acquisitions at the Rubell Family Collection (through June 29, 2019).

“Martha Jungwirth is a painter whom you really feel has been working her craft a long time, and you feel the intensity and the purposefulness of it.”

—Jason Rubell

Martha Jungwirth

Portrait S, 2015-2016

Oil on cardboard

17 1/8 x 13 1/4 inches (43.5 x 33.5 cm)

Tomma Abts

Untitled #6, 2004

Graphite and colored pencil on paper

33 x 23 1/2 inches (83.8 x 59.7 cm)

German artist Tomma Abts (b. 1967) studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1988 to 1995. Abts makes complex paintings and works on paper, the subject of which is ultimately the process of their creation. She begins each work with no preconceived composition or idea and without preliminary sketches. Guided largely by intuition, she nevertheless works within precise parameters. While abstract, the works are still illusionistic, rendered with sharp attention to shadows, three-dimensional effects, and highlights that defy any single, realistic light source. The resulting works convey balance and movement, while maintaining a sense of uncertainty, which seems akin to memory.

Franz West, Von roter Grütze befangen und danach… (Trapped by Red Groats and Afterwards…), 1987 (detail)

Austrian-born artist Franz West (1947–2012) studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna from 1977 to 1982. West developed a unique aesthetic that engaged equally high and low reference points and often privileged social interaction as an intrinsic component of his work. By playfully manipulating everyday materials and imagery, the artist created objects that serve to redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the way in which art is presented to the public and how viewers interact with works of art and with each other. Part of his series of collages, Von roter Grütze befangen und danach… (Trapped by Red Groats and Afterwards…) (1987) depicts four nude women around which the artist painted backdrops of red, pink, purple, white, and black, creating a suite of images that is both dynamically charged and unsettling. In the mid-1980s, West began producing painted abstract sculptural forms such as Studi Romani di Colore II (Study of Roman Color II) (1990). These sculptures, which were displayed on plinths, as floor sculptures, or mural reliefs, were meant to question the aesthetic ideal of the autonomous work of art by presenting a work that, on first appearance, might be somewhat confounding to the viewer.

Franz West

Studi Romani di Colore II (Study of Roman Color II), 1990

Papier-mâché, paint, and mixed media

15 x 21 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches (38.1 x 54.6 x 26 cm)

Franz West

Von roter Grütze befangen und danach… (Trapped by Red Groats and Afterwards…), 1987

Paint on magazine advertisements in three (3) parts in artist's frame

17 x 33 1/2 inches (43.2 x 85.1 cm)

“The Viewing Room is an exciting idea that pushes new viewership, allows access, and broadens the visibility for contemporary artists.” —Jason Rubell

Kaari Upson, MMDP III (Vertical Slit), 2016 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. Photo by Timo Ohler

Kaari Upson (b. 1972) is an American artist who studied at the New York Studio School before receiving her BFA in 2004 and MFA in 2007 from California Institute of the Arts. Her sculptures, paintings, drawings, and videos explore the darker aspects of human relationships, regularly referencing aspects of the body including its malleable form, its strengths, and frailties. Since 2014, Upson has worked with Pepsi cans—common objects which connect with the artist’s memories of her mother’s daily routine. Upson’s association of Pepsi with indulgence and disgust is manifest in works such as MMDP III (Vertical Slit) (2016), in which cans are stacked into ominous, totemic forms that are complicated by the Pepsi brand’s connection with consumerism, consumption, and pleasure (MMDP stands for My Mother Drinks Pepsi). In 2017, Upson’s work was presented in a solo exhibition, titled Good thing you are not alone, at the New Museum, New York, and in the Istanbul and Whitney biennials. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kaari Upson

MMDP III (Vertical Slit), 2016

Aluminum and stainless steel

94 x 24 x 19 inches (238.8 x 61 x 48.3 cm)

Oscar Murillo creating works on site during a summer residency at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, 2012

Oscar Murillo

Manifestation of Loss, 15, 2017

Oil, spray paint, graphite, and silkscreen on paper

61 x 41 inches (154.9 x 104.1 cm) Framed: 64 3/8 x 44 3/8 inches (163.5 x 112.7 cm)

Born in Colombia and based in various locations, Oscar Murillo (b. 1986) earned his BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by his MFA in 2012 from the city’s Royal College of Art. Exploring the notion of cultural exchange, Murillo’s work conveys a nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while maintaining the universality of human experience. Manifestation of Loss, 15 (2017) belongs to a group of large-scale works on paper that addresses in visual terms the artist’s growing sense of cultural erosion. Murillo has built up layers of both found and invented imagery and phrases, resulting in inchoate surfaces that bear traces of their own creation.

German artist Neo Rauch (b. 1960) studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, where he continues to live and work. His paintings are characterized by their distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction in enigmatic compositions featuring an eccentric iconography of human characters, animals, and hybrid forms in familiar-looking but imaginary settings. The paintings often display palettes of strong, complementary colors, and the artist’s treatment of scale is deliberately arbitrary and non-perspectival, seeming to allude to different time zones or planes of existence. Dieb, the title of this 2004 painting, translates to “thief.” As Rauch notes about the importance of language in his practice, “occasionally a word can trigger a painting. It can happen that a word develops an incredible atmospheric undertow in the direction of a painting that produces itself where my only duty is to assist.”

Neo Rauch

Dieb, 2004

Oil on canvas

15 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (40 x 50.2 cm)
Framed: 17 1/8 x 21 1/16 x inches (43.5 x 53.5 cm)

Neo Rauch, Dieb, 2004 (detail)

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Collector's Focus: Jason Rubell