The Brooklyn Rail

On the day after Rachel Feinstein’s thirty-year retrospective opened at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, a hurricane of unprecedented size and breadth swept across Florida, cutting a swathe miles wide. Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26, 2024, as a Category 4 storm, with wind speeds of 120 knots. Though Miami was spared a direct hit, high winds and storm condition warnings were in force. The museum weighed the idea of postponing the opening, but as the hurricane seemed set to wreak havoc in a more northerly direction, decided to go ahead. The museum welcomed the public to view the first major show of Feinstein’s works to be hosted in her hometown. “I am very excited about this show,” Feinstein told me just prior to the museum opening its doors. “It feels very different to have almost thirty years of my art [shown] in my hometown. It’s been very emotional, and I’ve teared up a couple times talking about all the loss and changes.”

Curated by James Voorhies and Claudia Mattos, Feinstein’s show captures the ambivalence, magic, scariness and mystique of the historic city. There is reverence for the deep, green, stimulating fecundity of nature, and an abiding astonishment at (and enjoyment of) the socially louche non-culture of the 1970s and ’80s Miami scene. With images both wondrously elegant and somehow ingenuously vulgar, both tribute and fabliaux, Feinstein pays homage to the fertile soil of her artistic cultivation. During one of our many conversations about the surreal Miami scene, the sheer, inexhaustible aliveness of the place has been a dominant theme. Even in death there is relentless rebirth, the tremendous activity of rot and decay.

In Miami, plants and insects proliferate madly, hour by hour. At night, the lush overgrowth is rustling, active, inhabited. The dense, thrusting garden growth, that requires constant trimming and tending, seethes with improbably large bugs and the ravenous birds, cats, and reptiles that hunt them. Trees and plants subjected to aggressive pruning by day replenish themselves overnight. The many waterways roil with (possibly hostile, possibly flesh eating) fish, snakes, alligators, parasitic organisms, and swiftly replicating colonies of toxic and other algae. Whether polluted or not, Miami’s rivers, creeks, and canals teem with life.

Feinstein’s exhibition includes a new site-specific mural, Panorama of Miami (2024), a massive thirty foot-long installation of painted mirrored wall panels. Commissioned by the Bass Museum specifically for the show, the huge mural gives a fantasy realist treatment of the strange, lovely, often macabre natural features and landmarks of the historic town. The city here presented is a phantasmagorical mental and physical landscape of simultaneous sophistication and decadence. The South Florida environment is seen as paradoxical in its relentless liveliness and bloom, paired with constant, ongoing, accelerated decay. The panoramic work’s meta-narrative pictures Miami as formed of contradictory spaces. “Five panels that are six feet long by five feet tall—I made orange clouds and black palm trees like the scene in Scarface where Tony kills the chief of police and the drug lord Frank. My ninth-grade friend’s family owned the house where Michelle Pfeiffer comes down in the elevator. They were drug dealers.”

Inside the brilliantly lit show space, several disparate but thematically related events take place simultaneously. There’s a white sculptural piece that resembles a cross between a Rococo fairytale castle and a beach shack. It comes complete with an evil queen’s Perrault-styled eighteenth-century mirror-mirror on the wall and a rainbow hued grand staircase. The piece also suggests a fantastic Everglades swamp-bound, water-rooted tree house. The Ent-like animated mangrove-type base appears to tentatively extend a motile root, like a foot—perhaps to start its trek back to the otherworldly realm from which it came.

In the same exhibition hall, an impressionistic figural sculpture of a Victoria’s Secret model from the 2018 “Angels” series “owns the runway,” confidently striding in a wildly pigmented, abstracted representation of reconfigured femininity. These sculptures evoke one of Feinstein’s abiding inspirations, the neoclassical sculptures of Donatello, whose bronze David (ca. 1450) for the Palazzo Medici in Florence assumes the typical contrapposto stance of the ancient Greek warrior or athlete at rest. Donatello’s triumphant boy hero stands on the severed head of Goliath wearing nothing but a jauntily feathered helmet (insignia of the Florence soldiery under Medici rule), and a mysterious smile. This is the “sublime” smile of archaic Greek kouros sculptures of the paradigmatic “beautiful youth,” or warrior ephebe, reclaimed by Renaissance humanists in art and literature.

Feinstein’s “Angels” wear the finery and tat of seduction, modern notions of commercialized female sexuality that vie with the openness of the upturned faces, gazing trustingly into the stage lights. Their smeared, innocent, abstracted grins challenge the viewer’s assumptions around female temptation, objectification, self-sufficiency and agency. The “Angels” sculptures’ air of ingenuousness, insouciance and risk seem to sum up the precociousness of Feinstein’s early teen years in the “American Riviera.” In many ways, Miami was America’s premier crazy town in the seventies and eighties. More than Las Vegas, more than LA, the town was a citadel of excess and fabulation, a spectacle of blended wonder, horror and the fantastic. “Everything was like a fairy tale on steroids,” Feinstein told me, “With implants.” Further, “My sister is a vet in South Florida and told me that macho Hispanic men will have her put in silicone fake balls for their dogs when they are fixed. A new level. They are called Neuticles.”

I marvelled at that. The evolution of cosmetic surgery procedures for women and men nowadays perform—the butt implants, breast enhancements, and penis enlargements—so evidently fill out the microscopic bathing attire witnessed on Miami beaches. Reflecting that the go-to macho dog breeds in South Florida are Pit Bulls, Dobermanns, or Cane Corsos, I couldn’t help but form mental associations among Feinstein’s dad’s profession as a dermatologist in the last century and the artist’s sister’s veterinary practice having to provide sexual enhancements for massive, emasculated protection dogs—the kind that guard the homes and properties of some of the more fastidiously image-conscious macho-elite of South Florida. The Miami legacy continues to provide the deep waters for Feinstein’s imagistic delving. Themes of sex, sexuality, and sexual agency (of man, woman, beauty and the proverbial beast, whether queer, straight, sublimated or overt) continue to feature prominently in any Feinstein body of works.

As a related footnote, last December Gagosian presented Feinstein’s sculpture Metal Storm (2024) in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians section. An earlier iteration of the concept, a large wooden sculpture of interlocking planes, was presented in her 2022 solo show, Mirror, at Gagosian’s Davies Street London gallery. The Meridians showcase, curated by Yasmil Raymond and dedicated to “large-scale projects that push the boundaries of the traditional art fair booth,” seemed a perfect venue for Feinstein’s dynamic new bronze sculpture. The work depicts an abstracted vision of Hans Baldung Grien’s 1514 drawing, New Year’s Greeting with Three Witches. Commanding the topic of feminine sex in all of its variety (fey and earthy, youthful and aged, sacred and profane), the three-dimensional tableau untethers Baldung Grien’s ecstatically gyrating, stooping and bending witches from intimations of evil and the shadow of the witch hunt. No longer limited to the role of temptresses caught in the act of committing some sort of unspecified maleficium, they are transfigured as actively redemptive. Feinstein’s witches are discovered to perform a powerful and exuberant rite of resurrection and renewal. They are uncanny and fey, for sure, but also reassuringly mundane. Feinstein’s witches, like her “Angels,” are very much in and of this world.