Partial installation view of 'One Hundred Fish Fountain' (2005) at Donald Young Gallery. (Courtesy the artist and Donald Young Gallery)

Like most contemporary art galleries, the Gagosian Gallery's international branches tend to go quiet by the end of July, closing to the public or keeping on view a show that opened much earlier in the season. This year, though, Gagosian's flagship spot at 980 Madison will open two month-long shows on July 30, each presenting one major artwork, Robert Ryman's A Painting in Four Parts and Bruce Nauman's One Hundred Fish Fountain.

Mr. Nauman's piece debuted at Chicago's Donald Young Gallery in 2005, the same year it was made, and sold for a cool $2 million to hedge-fund manager Adam Sender, according to an article by Judd Tully in the December 2005 issue of Art+Auction magazine. (Donald Young, who was Mr. Nauman's dealer in Chicago, died in April.) Mr. Sender sold a group of works from his collection at the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company in 2006, and put a sculpture by Charles Ray on the block at Sotheby's two months ago (estimated at $4 million to $6 million, it failed to find a buyer). The Nauman piece at Gagosian is presumably for sale, however neither the collector nor Gagosian returned a request for comment.

The Nauman sculpture, one of the largest artworks the artist has ever made, is a functional fountain comprised of 97 bronze casts of fish that are suspended throughout the air that noisily shoot water out of their mouths into a large basin below, occasionally coming to a complete halt. Shortly after Mr. Sender purchased it, the work was on long-term loan to the Dia Art Foundation's museum in Beacon, N.Y., where it was displayed alongside Dia's extensive holdings of major Nauman works. In fall 2007, the Kestner Gesellschaft, a museum in Hanover, Germany, showed the piece in a special exhibition and produced a catalogue.

In 2006, Mr. Sender's then-curator Todd Levin mentioned One Hundred Fish Fountain to Art+Auction magazine in the context of discussing what were then the collector's plans for an exhibition space for his collection. Measuring 25 feet and 28 feet on its sides, the sheer scale of the work practically demands such a large institutional setting.

Mr. Levin, director of the Levin Art Group, accompanied Mr. Sender to Donald Young Gallery during the Nauman show in 2005, and encouraged him to buy the piece. (Mr. Sender had already acquired a neon work by Mr. Nauman.) Reached by phone this afternoon, Mr. Levin said, "One Hundred Fish Fountain was—and still is—the most important artwork created in this century so far."

If it is for sale, its price tag is likely well in excess of $3 million. Though Mr. Nauman's auction record is $9.9 million, achieved for the 1967 plaster sculpture Henry Moore Bound to Fail at Christie's in 2001, very few of his works have come up to auction. Only three pieces have sold on the block for more than $2 million. Due more to its size than its price tag, there are, internationally, a limited number of buyers for such a work, perhaps a billionaire planning a private museum. A possibility, one imagines, would be Eli Broad, the Los Angeles–based mega-collector who has a large Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed private museum in the works across from the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., and whose Nauman holdings are not among his collection's greatest strengths. Since Mr. Nauman resided in California early in his career, it would be a logical addition.

The upcoming show at 980 Madison is also notable since it is Mr. Nauman's first significant appearance at Gagosian Gallery—not exactly a solo show since, assuming it's for sale, it's a secondary market piece that is being presented. His work has occasionally popped up in group shows at Gagosian over the years. Mr. Gagosian is certainly known to be a fan of the artist's work. He was quoted in Art+Auction in 1990 saying, “Nauman’s true value has yet to be realized.” Mr. Nauman has been deeply committed to his dealers over the years, showing with his primary New York gallery Sperone Westwater since 1975. He remains with Sperone Westwater.

Sarah Douglas contributed reporting.

(Image courtesy Mocoloco.org)

Update, July 11, 6 p.m.: An earlier version of this article misstated the date that Mr. Nauman began showing with the Sperone Westwater gallery. He has been represented by the gallery since 1975.

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled," 1981. (Photo courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures)

If you've worked in, or reported on, the contemporary art world long enough, you're familiar with the idea of the obsessive collector. This is the collector who just can't stop acquiring artworks, and who has built his or her house to accommodate the collection, adding rooms that are designated as galleries, rooms from which furniture has been all but banished.

An exhibition in Miami this December, "Home Alone," will take that idea to its logical extreme.

Longtime contemporary art collector Adam Sender, 42, founder of the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, and his wife Lenore will put a  portion of their contemporary art holdings on view for the first time in an exhibition in a private North Miami residence during Art Basel Miami Beach. Organized by Sender Collection curator Sarah Aibel, the exhibition will present a fictional scenario in which a collection has grown so huge that it has forced the collector and his family to pack up and leave. The art has literally taken over the house.

The setting for this exhibition is a house that Mr. Sender, who also maintains a residence in Sag Harbor, N.Y., bought in North Miami last year, but then decided he wanted to sell. Mr. Sender and his family moved into a new house nearby, leaving this one empty. So, while the house is on the market, he decided to give Ms. Aibel the run of it, curatorially speaking, and open it up to art audiences during Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual art fair extravaganza that has hit Miami every December since 2002.

The Observer caught up with Ms. Aibel by phone a couple weeks ago, when she was at the house, planning and beginning to install the show.

"My thought process at first was, I was fighting against the idea that this was a residential space," she said. "I wanted to turn it into a white box. But it's a residential space. Period. So I wanted to use that to its advantage."

She installed some 70 artworks throughout the entire 5,000-square-foot home, including in closets and bathrooms. The exhibition features a number of provocative pieces installed in provocative places; a highlight is certain to be Richard Prince's racy Spiritual America—a reproduction of a famously controversial photograph of Brooke Shields as a child, heavily made-up and naked, standing in a bathtub—hanging in one of the house's bathrooms, right above the bathtub. (That's not the only clever placement: Also look for Vito Acconci's Seedbed, documentation of a 1972 performance the artist did that involved masturbating under a piece of plywood, placed underneath a sloped ceiling.)

The pieces on view were acquired by the Senders as early as when they first began collecting, in 1998. There are works by young artists like Rashid Johnson, Frank Benson, Diana Al-Hadid, Jim Lambie and Urs Fischer, as well as more established ones like Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney, Chris Ofili, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. Many of the pieces have never before been on public view in the United States.

There has been some anticipation surrounding the Senders' contemporary art holdings going on view. A few years ago, Mr. Sender, who has loaned pieces to institutions like the Guggenheim and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had plans to put the collection, which reportedly numbers around 800 works, in a private exhibition space. He considered purchasing a disused church near his home in Sag Harbor, then decided to instead become a board member of the nearby Parrish Art Museum. In June, he opened his Hamptons home, where major artworks by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Sol LeWitt and other artists were installed, for a cocktail party in support of that museum.

The Miami house will be open at select times during Art Basel Miami Beach, for private brunch receptions on the mornings of the fair, and for a private evening reception. Along with events hosted by other Miami collectors, such as Martin Margulies, Debra and Dennis Scholl and the Rubell Family, the Senders' exhibition is included on the VIP schedule of the fair.

From the sound of it, this will be a refreshing display. "How many shows do you see in white boxes?" Ms. Aibel asked The Observer rhetorically. "You go to collection visits in homes, but when have you ever seen a show that has taken over a residence? It seemed like an interesting angle."