Exhibitions: Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection

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  January 31, 2009: Thirty-eight works of art in various media from one of Miami’s most celebrated young artists, Hernan Bas, will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection draws from art collected over the past ten years by the Rubell family. This exhibition will be on view from February 27 to May 24, 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum.
  
  Hernan Bas has a great fascination with historical painting, popular fiction, Goth culture, and nineteenth-century dandyism. Using these influences, his paintings often depict androgynous boys on the edge of adulthood in narratives drawn from Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent period. Inspired by these authors, Bas creates his own romantic mythologies from a perspective that explores masculinity and gay culture.
  
  Designed like the chapters of a book, this exhibition presents the development of Bas in a manner that can be read symbolically and literally. One of his earliest series, which was inspired by the Hardy Boys mystery stories, depicts a young adventurous duo exploring atmospheric scenes—dark caves, woods, and mysterious interiors. The eerie settings and unresolved narratives connect Bas’s two recurring characters in an intimate and sexually charged relationship. His later work involves more colorful and richly painted surfaces that place contemporary-looking men in historical environments. The Swan Prince (2004) presents the Bavarian king Ludwig II as a bare-chested young man, floating in a half shell pulled by three swans. Bas’s more recent artwork includes the large-scale, dense mixed-media work, The Great Barrier Wreath (2006), a three-panel painting of men, swans, and flamingos in a style reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch; and a mixed-media installation, Ocean’s Symphony (2007), that reimagines the hoax of the Fiji mermaid with a mermaid replica lying in a casket surrounded by nautical objects and video projections.
  
  Hernan Bas was born in Miami in 1978 of Cuban expatriate parents; he is a graduate of The New World School of the Arts in Miami. His work has been seen in numerous solo and group shows and is in private and public collections throughout the Unites States, among them the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He currently lives and works in Miami.
  
  Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection was organized by Mark Coetzee, former Director of the Rubell Family Collection; the Brooklyn Museum presentation is coordinated by Charles Desmarais, Deputy Director for Art. The exhibition is made possible by the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund.
  

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Press Coverage of this Exhibition

• A Young Artist, a Big RetrospectiveMarch 11, 2009 "Works by the 31-year-old Miami-based artist Hernan Bas, who currently has an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum...."
• ART REVIEW | HERNAN BAS; Young Man on the Half Shell Bespeaks Nostalgic LongingMarch 11, 2009 By KEN JOHNSON"Hernan Bas paints and draws storytelling images of winsome young men in homoerotically charged situations. At 31, Mr. Bas, who lives in Miami, is an artist of modest achievement, his career so far more promising than accomplished. So why is he the subject of a big, splashy retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum? That the exhibition was organized by..."
• Museum and Gallery ListingsMarch 20, 2009 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.comart. Museums AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM: 'THE SEDUCTION OF LIGHT,' through March 29. Comparisons may be invidious, but they can also be illuminating. Consider this small, tightly focused exhibition of portraits by the 19th-century American..."
• The ListingsMarch 27, 2009 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.comart. Museums BARD GRADUATE CENTER: 'ENGLISH EMBROIDERY FROM THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, 1580-1700,' through April 12. At once revelatory and great fun, this exhibition examines one of the world's most beloved and ancient art..."