FIGURATION AND CONCEPTUALISM IN CRAIG ROBINS COLLECTION
The Craig Robins Collection in Miami is comprised of over 1300 pieces of contemporary art and innovative design, and exhibited within the Dacra headquarters in the Miami Design District. The 2023-2024 exhibition is titled A Train of Thoughts, focusing on two core subgroups from the collection holdings: figuration and conceptualism.
Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages serves as starting point for a lineage of conceptual practices in the collection that includes Joseph Beuys, Richard Tuttle, Jac Lierner, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jorge Macchi, and John Baldessari.
Simultaneously, prints from Francisco de Goya’s Caprichos and Disasters of War series find phenomenal resonance in more contemporary artworks by Marlene Dumas, Jana Euler and Nicole Eisenman, defining a sense of figuration that deals with eerie and uncanny subjects and prevails throughout the collection.
The exhibition highlights a collecting history that has favored a taste for the abject and hyperbolic image, in tandem with the self-reflexive, institutional critique of art based on ideas– a seemingly incompatible pair that yields unexpected dialogues.