The Rubell Family Collection has a unique place in the landscape of the art world. While it remains a strong Miami institution in its own right, market-makers and hangers-on, as well as intellectuals, follow the family’s movements. Just about everyone wants to know what the Rubells have been up to, and this week they can find out. The main show this season, High Anxiety (until 25 August), features works from Don and Mira Rubell’s recent, prolific art buying. The Rubells have acquired 407 works since 2014; the pieces in High Anxiety are all drawn from that period. The show aims to mix generations, with works by established artists such as Isa Genzken and Hito Steyerl; next-generation voices such as Ryan Trecartin; and buzzy up-and-comers such as Anne Imhof—the subject of a trilogy of shows this year in Basel, Berlin and Montreal—and Frank Benson, whose lifesize 3D printed sculpture of a transgender fellow-artist, Juliana (2014-15), was the face of the New Museum’s 2015 triennial.
Interest in Kounellis has been on the rise since his Tate Modern show in 2009, and there were queues around the block to see the artist’s 1969 work Untitled (12 Horses)—which used live animals—when it was shown in the summer of 2015 at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. All the same, the Miami collector Martin Margulies balked at the idea of staging it at his warehouse space, where a show of Kounellis’ work opened in October (until 29 April). “New York is used to stuff like that,” Margulies said in an interview. “They wanted to do it in Miami, and I said, ‘I’d have a line of animal protesters all over the place!’” The latest show does not lack ambition, however. Seven impressive works dating from between 1983 and 2012 have been installed with the assistance of Kounellis’s studio. They include Untitled (1985-97) a 16.5ft-high “sculptural painting”—as the artist refers to all of his work—made of steel I-beams and railway sleepers, which dominates one wall of the warehouse.
While work continues on the Institute of Contemporary Art’s planned permanent home, Miami’s youngest art institution is operating out of the Moore Building in the Design District. On show in this airy, shopping-mall-like space is the first US museum presentation of work by the German artist Thomas Bayrle, whose large-scale installation Wire Madonna (2016) is to be found in the building’s atrium—bait for eager Instagrammers (until 26 March). The exhibition surveys Bayrle’s 50-year career, with around 160 works. The transformation of the human figure in the media world is a recurrent theme in Bayrle’s work. In a video from the 1970s, a cityscape transforms into the terrorist Carlos the Jackal. It’s the kind of programming you won’t find anywhere else in Miami this week.