by Camille Lamb
Mikhail Baryshnikov, Untitled # 20 (2008) Merce Cunningham Dance Company in "eyeSpace" by Merce Cunningham, Archival Pigment Print, Edition 1/3 Gary Nader Gallery
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1. Wifredo Lam, Sans Titre, (1937) Oil on Canvas, 13-5/8" x 31-1/8" Gary Nader Gallery 2. Mikhail Baryshnikov, Untitled # 4 (2011) Rebecca Hytting and Bobbi Smith of Batsheva Dance Company, Archival Pigment Print, Edition 1/3 Gary Nader Gallery 3. Carlos Quintana, Untitled, (1996) Oil on Canvas, 78-3/4" x 63" Gary Nader Gallery
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His family is Lebanese but he spent his childhood in the DR and Spanish is his first language. At 55,000 square feet, The Gary Nader Arts Center the currently the world’s largest private gallery space, and houses the largest private collection of paintings from Latin masters like Fernando Botero, Roberto Matta, Guillermo Munoz Vera, Pablo Picasso, Agustin Cardenas, and Wifredo Lam. Nader also counts Marc Chagall, Henry Matisse, Claude Monet, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella among the artists in his collection. Visitors to the gallery begin to experience its offerings before they even step out of their cars; the parking lot outside the warehouseturned-gallery is strewn with metal sculptures, including a muscular torso whose extremities have been lopped off; a disembodied head with a corpulent cheeks, surprised eyes, and a smallish, downturned pout; and a round-bodied woman whose curvaceous buttocks and hips protrude unabashedly into the atmosphere.
All of these are Boteros, but Stella, John Henry, and several other artists are represented in the urban sculpture park as well. Walking into the gallery in the middle of a typical weekday can give the visitor a mischievous feeling. There’s something almost too good and too easy about standing face-to-face with a million-dollar Botero, or a swirling, otherworldly Matta, with nothing but silent white spaciousness fanning out in every direction. One of Nader’s assistants may even have to turn the lights on for you as you venture up to the second floor for a delicious, ultra-private viewing of fabric-infused pieces by Brazilian artist Walter Goldfarb, statues by soulful and intelligent Cuban-Spanish-American artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, and a large room dedicated to the photographs of dance legend Mikhail Baryshnikov, which remain on display until October. Nader opened his first American art gallery in Miami’s Coconut Grove, then relocated to Coral Gables a few miles to the north. He announced his decision to move into Wynwood in 2005, and the response from his friends and colleagues was less than supportive. “People said to me, ‘You must be out of your mind!’ Wynwood was just crack houses and homeless people,” Nader said. “Luckily, I was the first gallery to open here, and since I did, more than 20 other galleries have opened here and more than 10 million square feet of new buildings has come up. And more and more, things are coming along,” he said. Art Basel, the all-consuming Miami Beach-based art expo that took hold in South Florida more than a decade ago, has helped build the art scene all over Miami, Nader said. During the rest of the year, his stellar collection still experiences some slow days, but the collector isn’t fazed. “People have to understand, this is a new city. We’re not 400 years old like New York. But now a lot of people are coming to live in Miami, because we have operas, great hotels, nightlife, the beach, and Art Basel. Every winter, we have the most important people in the art world visiting us. So it’s changing for the best,” Nader said. “But we have such great weather here and the outside, it’s so gorgeous. In other cities, you see young people in the museums because they have nothing else to do. But we have a lot of competition. It’s an extraordinary place for the beach and the nightlife, so young people are, you know, it’s a little harder to get [them] into CONTEMPORARY CULTURE//MAGAZINE
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