By Jordan Melnick | December 2nd, 2011 | 1 Comment
Few people create more of a stir when they enter the room than EVA & ADELE. You may not know them by name, but to see them is to have the image emblazoned on your memory forever. They are a fixture of art happenings around the world, including Art Basel Miami Beach, where I first spotted them in person last year. Starkly bald, both feminine, masculine, and neither, dressed identically and in high fashion, smiling, they managed to become the center of attention in a corridor lined with Picassos, Warhols, and other legends.
They were an incredible sight — a vision, really, somewhat disturbing — but for whatever reason I never got around to looking them up. But after I saw them again, at the Convention Center on Wednesday and at the Rubell house for a yogurt breakfast on Thursday, I got curious. Before I go further, here they are at the ABMB vernissage on Wednesday.
From left to right: Adele and Eva, more commonly referred to as EVA & ADELE
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By Jordan Melnick | December 1st, 2011 | 2 Comments
Every year during Art Basel Miami Beach, the Rubells, Miami’s foremost art-collecting clan, invite guests to their 45,000-square-foot Wynwood home/museum for an artful breakfast. Last year the fare was oatmeal, and you served yourself through a ritualized process that featured mounds of spoons and sugar packets, stacks of bowls, rows of milk, and a phalanx of crock pots — each component a dwindling sculpture.
This year the breakfast exhibition, organized by Jennifer Rubell, is called Incubation and it is as much cultured as cultural.
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By Jordan Melnick | November 28th, 2011 | No Comments
The Rubell Family Collection's upcoming exhibition, American Exuberance, aims to awaken its viewers to the modern American condition.
“Exuberance” is one of the many “e”-words that aptly describe Art Basel Miami Beach, both the fair itself and the larger, enveloping phenomenon that encompasses a constellation of satellite fairs, a festival’s worth of live music performances (see the Art Basel Music Guide), endless exhibitions at galleries, museums, and private collections, and, of course, a panoply of parties, shindigs, and soirées. Indeed, “enveloping”, “encompassing”, “endless”, and “exhibitionist” are also apt “e”s, as are “extravagant”, “elephantine”, and, ultimately, “exhausting”.
Getting back to “exuberance”. Don and Mera Rubell, whose private contemporary art collection, housed in a former DEA-facility in Wynwood, is one of the biggest in the world, say the word jumped to mind when they were thinking up a title for their mega-exhibition, American Exuberance, which, as we already mentioned in our Art Basel To Do List, will open on Wednesday, a day before Art Basel Miami Beach proper.
“This title was in the mood of the moment,” Ms. Rubell told me in a recent interview. Her husband added: “Although we usually use ‘exuberance’ in a very positive, upbeat manner, the word has to do, more than anything, with forms of excess behavior, and I think this show is a reflection of that.”
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