Adam Sender’s first-ever exhibition of his private collection, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach, slyly imagines what kind of mischief might ensue when a collector leaves his art at home alone. Many of the 70 items, culled from the hedge-fund manager’s holdings of more than 1,000 artworks, are making their United States debut in the show, which is being held in the now-vacant 5,000-square-foot North Bay Road property that he used to inhabit before his recent move to another Miami estate. “It’s totally unlivable conceptually and logistically,” Sender Collection curator Sarah Aibel said of the display, running from November 29 to December 4. “The only furniture is the art.”
Many of the illustrious private collections that call Miami home, such as the Rubell Family Collection and the Margulies Collection, mount their finest and most carefully curated presentations during Art Basel. For Sender’s show, Aibel wanted to play with the fact that “a private collection isn’t a museum,” she said. Instead of attempting to transform the house into a white-walled gallery, she made the entire exhibition about toying with the notion of displaying art in a domestic space.
Three wax-candle sculptures of nude women by Urs Fischer greet visitors at the door — “almost as if they were occupants,” according to Aibel. A speaker system by Banks Violette eats up half of one room. The bathrooms, too, have been given over to art: one is entirely devoted to American artist Raymond Pettibon. In another, Richard Prince’s "Spiritual America," depicting a nude, prepubescent Brooke Shields leaning on a bathtub, hangs above a real tub in the children’s bathroom. (Aibel noted that the Senders will rent a separate bathroom outside the house for guests to use as, well, a bathroom.) The master bedroom will feature a presentation of the British painter Sarah Lucas — who has never had a solo museum show — consisting entirely of works never publicly shown in the U.S.
Such a ruckus seems only fitting for the art world’s most festive gathering. “It’s almost like the art is having a party,” Aibel said.