Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: Rauschenberg’s Leap

Photo courtesy of Gemini G.E.L.

By KURT COLE EIDSVIG December 13th, 2025

Miami in December is a city of numbers. While the rest of the world counts down to year-end, Miami Art Week counts up: more galleries, more yachts, more millions in sales, more selfies. The only thing better than too much is more.

This year, the data backed the drama. Art Basel Miami Beach hosted 283 galleries from 43 countries, welcomed more than 80,000 visitors, and drew representatives from over 240 museums and foundations. Nearly 20 satellite fairs amplified that momentum. Untitled Art reported sold-out booths, first-time institutional placements, and more than $500,000 in sales through advisor-led tours.

Inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, sales included an $18 million Warhol, a $5.5 million Richter, and six- and seven-figure transactions across blue-chip inventories. Miami Art Week became both spectacle and scoreboard, where volume, attendance, and velocity all pointed upward. Every statistic felt precise and inflated at once. If the brain were an electrical panel, Miami Art Week was when every breaker threatened to blow.

Under Bridget Finn’s second year directing Art Basel Miami Beach, the fair felt louder in the best sense: more energy in the aisles, stronger institutional engagement, more emotional charge behind the work.

Against this rising pulse, one presence felt almost mythic: Robert Rauschenberg. His centennial year, marked globally with exhibitions, performances, grants, and archival activations through 2026, mirrors the artist’s own working method: expansive, collaborative, porous between disciplines. Across institutions, the initiative revisits how he dissolved boundaries between painting, printmaking, photography, textiles, performance, and civic engagement, reshaping how contemporary art circulates and communicates.

Gemini G.E.L. carried that influence forward in Miami this December. Its presentation included works such as Scrape (1974) and Pull (1974)—tall collages built from transfer imagery, newspaper fragments, cloth, and paper bags—that underscored how prescient Rauschenberg’s language remains. Tibetan Keys (Centers) (1987), a sculpture functioning as both object and diagram, extended that argument into three dimensions. In the context of the centennial, these were less artifacts than evidence of how deeply Rauschenberg’s visual language has imprinted itself on the present.

I first grasped the scale of that imprint at MASS MoCA in 1999, inside The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece. Nearly 1,000 feet long, it felt less like an exhibition than access to an operating system. Roller-skating its length would produce the same blur we now scroll through daily, one image bleeding into the next in relentless succession. It is hard to find a more ahead-of-his-time artist for Miami Art Week, whose fairs teem with collage, saturated color, reflective surfaces, hand marks, and the absurd proximity of intimacy and spectacle. Rauschenberg already mastered these techniques many decades ago.

While every turn in the convention halls presents a fresh demand on attention, one Rauschenberg work became, for me, the fair’s quiet center. Pull felt emblematic of the week, not because it shouted for attention, but because it condensed everything Miami Art Week performs at scale: image saturation, spiritual charge, material experimentation, and the uneasy merge of spectacle and intimacy.

Rauschenberg’s Pull (1974)—an 85-by-48-inch collage, edition of 29—anchors itself with a diver, arms fully extended. Where Yves Klein’s 1960 Saut dans le Vide tilts precariously toward the void in a diagonal to the picture plane, Rauschenberg’s figure reads like a capital T: upright, frontal, arms wide. It is airborne and cruciform, its meaning hovering between spiritual icon and avant-garde risk.

Mounted on fabric, Pull quivered as viewers walked past. Its surface shifted like breath. Instead of Klein’s staged leap, it evoked relic cloth, the idea of a body impressed into fabric, material made singular by touch.

Pull belongs to Rauschenberg’s Hoarfrost Editions (1974), a series of nine large-scale fabric works produced with Gemini G.E.L. that pushed his pursuit of dematerialization to its furthest edge. Made from chiffon, satin, cheesecloth, and muslin, the Hoarfrosts carry transferred images and text from newspapers and magazines. Rauschenberg described them as “shimmering information,” images meant to exist somewhere between memory and presence. Hung loosely from pushpins, the fabric responds to air and movement, allowing light to become an active collaborator. Named after the fragile crystalline frost described in Dante’s Inferno, the Hoarfrosts—Mule, Ringer, Preview, Plus Fours, Pull, Scent, Scrape, Sand, and Ringer State—replace the solidity of the art object with instability, breath, and impermanence. In this context, Pull reads not as an isolated image but as part of a larger experiment in making material nearly disappear, turning looking into a physical encounter with motion, atmosphere, and time.

In a year dominated by textiles and soft surfaces, Pull felt visionary, not trendy. This half-century-old collage anticipated today’s wave of fabric painting, hybrid sculpture, and image-transfer materiality. The diver-cross hovered between ascension and sacrifice; the surface rippled like lungs; the experiment echoed across the fairs without ever raising its voice.

There were other unforgettable encounters; original Keith Haring chalk drawings with the immediacy of touch, Rosenquists that bent perception, and emerging artists whose names will matter soon. I was stopped in my tracks by a Kara Walker. I watched Shepard Fairey slap stickers on a street sign on Collins Avenue and sat for a Miles Aldridge photo. But Pull stood apart because it felt unmistakably powerful, active, and alive. So much of Art Week mimics the frenetic pace of a Vegas casino; Pull countered that with impact and iconography that positioned Rauschenberg as a cultural forebear of our present moment. It was the quiet in the storm, a reminder of the power of a singular image in art.

Across his career, from Combines and solvent transfers to cardboard reliefs, neon assemblage, erased drawings, and that 1,000-foot epic, Rauschenberg insisted that art relates to both art and life. In Miami this year, that principle shifted from interview quotation to lived condition. The fairs resembled his 1/4 Mile; Pull became its lucid, breathing core.

Gemini G.E.L.’s display reminded viewers why seeing art in person still matters. Photographs flatten. Market chatter distracts. Online documentation cannot register how air animates fabric. In a week obsessed with transactions, spectacle, and access, Rauschenberg offered something rarer: presence.

Amidst a swarm of numbers; millions in sales, thousands of visitors, and too many artworks to tally, I choose one. Rauschenberg’s Pull was my favorite work of the week.