Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection
Fundación Banco Santander
Feb 11—June 17, 2012

Fundación Banco Santander presents the exhibition Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection at Sala de Arte Santander. The exhibition features 66 works by 33 contemporary artists drawn from the Rubell Family Collection.

The Rubell Family Collection (RFC) was founded by Don and Mera Rubell in New York in 1964. Nowadays its main premises are located in Miami. The RFC is one of the world’s leading private collections of contemporary art, not only because of the quality of the works owned but also because of the number of acquisitions by year. Due to these new acquisitions, the collection is constantly expanding.

The exhibition will present 68 works by the most prominent artists from the Rubell Family Collection, such as Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Peyton, Hernan Bass, Takashi Murakami, Neo Rauch, Francesco Clemente, Kaari Upson, Keith Haring, Adam McEwen, Cecily Brown…

Visit the Online Tour

February 27 – May 24, 2009
Brooklyn Museum, Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor

Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection includes thirty-eight works in various media by the young Miami-based artist that were collected over the past ten years by the Rubell family. Born in 1978 and a graduate of New World School of the Arts in Miami, Bas has become one of South Florida’s most celebrated artists. His work, which incorporates romantic and classical imagery, finds inspiration in youth and Goth culture, fashion layouts, and books, among them the Hardy Boys series, as well as the work of Wilde, Huysmans, and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent period of literature reimagined from the perspective of a young gay artist. At the center of the exhibition is a specially commissioned, grand-scale video and sculpture installation, Ocean's Symphony, a sumptuous tribute to the myth of the mermaid.

Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection was organized by Mark Coetzee, former Director of the Rubell Family Collection; the Brooklyn Museum presentation is coordinated by Charles Desmarais, Deputy Director for Art. The exhibition is made possible by the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund.

Traveling History:

February 27 – May 24, 2009
Brooklyn Museum, Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor

December 6, 2007 – May 30, 2008
Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Novemeber 8, 2008 - January 18, 2009
Palm Springs Art Museum

This exhibition, specifically organized for the Palm Springs Art Museum and personally curated by Mark Coetzee, Rubell Family Collection director, is the first of other future collaborations between the two museums involving a range of initiatives featuring exhibitions drawn from the rich holdings of the Rubell Family Collection.

The exhibition presents work Haring produced after his early mural and graffiti art.  Included in the exhibition are 70 paintings, drawings and one sculpture spanning from works he created for his first gallery exhibition in 1982 to others made closer to his death in 1990 at the age of 31. The exhibition also includes 33 works by other artists who were important friends and artistic peers in Haring's life, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, George Condo, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Andy Warhol.  Contextualized by the art of his associates, Haring's colorful and playful, yet equally powerful, acidic work records the lively engagement of art and culture that represented a key aspect of the New York art scene of the 1980s.

December 1, 2004 - February 27, 2005

“Life After Death” positions the paintings and drawings in this exhibition in the afterlife—the afterlife of the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), of social realism, and of painting in general. Traces of the GDR inhabit the grim interiors and muddled social modernist architecture in these paintings. Social realism, once the dominant style behind the Iron Curtain, possesses the figures who rarely make eye contact, keeping their thoughts to themselves. Painting itself (its death is an unlikely event that art critics proclaim every ten years or so) crops up in the emphasis on craft. You can see it in the use of classical gestures, graphite scaling grids, forced perspective, and careful attention to color.

Traveling History:

December 1, 2004 - February 27, 2005
Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL

March 19, 2005 - March 31, 2006
MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

April 21 - June 19, 2006
SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM

September 5 - October 29, 2006
American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC

February 16 - June 3, 2007
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA

June 23 - September 30, 2007
Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT

November 16, 2007 - February 3, 2008
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO

March 19 - May 18, 2008
Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN

April 14 - July 15, 2007
Tampa Museum of Art

Eberhard Havekost’s work critiques the proverbial dialogue between painting and photography by establishing a visual language that hovers in the grey space between the two. What is at once apparent in the juxtaposition of these two seemingly disparate media in Havekost’s hands, is their mutual dependence, despite their differences.

Working from personal photographs and found images, Havekost presents iconography that is familiar to all urban and suburban dwellers: bland modernist structures, featureless landscapes, and images of actual and impending violence. The significance of his work lies not in its subject matter, however, but in its execution. With a ready supply of images, artists like Havekost are as concerned with what to paint as they are how to paint. Resembling the generalization of color and tonal output of an inkjet printer, or a CCTV camera scanning our activities, Havekost’s works succeed in blending photography and painting–once rival genres. His creations are original work, by hand, but by digital processes too.

The Rubell Family Collection aims to present the entire range of an artist’s oeuvre by collecting large bodies of work of a single artist. This exhibition here marks the first museum showing of German artist Eberhard Havekost in the United States. The works for this exhibition were drawn exclusively from the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida.

Mark Coetzee

Traveling History

Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL
December 1, 2004 - September 30, 2005

American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC
September 6 - October 29, 2006

The Art Gallery at Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL
February 22 - March 31, 2007

Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL
April 14 - July 15, 2007

June 2 - September 2, 2007
Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel

"Memorials of Identity" features nine new media works by seven international artists dealing with issues of identity and quotidian reality. In these works, the artists individually explore memories, personal legacies and aspects of their backgrounds in an effort to express the political and historical realities of their countries. This juxtaposing of past and present helps them, and us, to define identity and meaning.

Artists in the exhibition:

William Kentridge
Sigalit Landau
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Sven Påhlsson
Anri Sala
Fiona Tan
Artur Žmijewski

Traveling History

The Art Gallery at Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL
February 3 - March 5, 2004

Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL
March 10 - May 30, 2004
December 1, 2004 - March 6, 2005

The Corcoran Gallery of Art / College of Art + Design, Washington, DC
April 25, 2005

Museo De Arte De Puerto Rico, Santurce, Puerto Rico
May 24 - June 11, 2006

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC
August 1 - September 25, 2006

Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel
June 2 - September 2, 2007