Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists

Hernan Bas is celebrated for works that, permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence and loaded with codes and double-meanings, point to the intricacies of self-identity while celebrating moments of transformation: the ordinary becoming extraordinary.

Inspired by late-nineteenth-century decadent art and literature, as well as concurrent movements in the visual arts, earlier paintings by the artist hinge on characters captured at various thresholds – between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience, public and private realms. Situated within a shifting terrain of interior and exterior spaces, these paintings are often grounded in the iconography of the flâneur and the dandy, usually portrayed alone or in small groups, and marry flamboyant subject matter with a refined touch to reinterpret various categories of classical painting from a Queer perspective. More recently, in his acclaimed series The Conceptualists, Bas followed a new theme, in which his protagonists engage in a variety of obsessive pursuits that, deemed strange under everyday circumstances, might be rationalised or even championed when considered as ‘conceptual art’.

Bas’ paintings often appear as if suspended in time. However, the stillness at the heart of his work is one of calculated ambiguity, held in counterpoint to the transportive effects – of literature, beauty, the supernatural – experienced by his subjects and, by proxy, us as viewers.

About the Artist

Hernan Bas, born in Miami, Florida in 1978, lives and works in Miami, Florida.

The artist’s recent solo institutional exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA (2023); Hernan Bas: Choose Your Own Adventure, Space K, Seoul, South Korea; Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai, China (2021–22); Hernan Bas, Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2020–22); Hernan Bas: A Brief Intermission, CAC Málaga, Spain (2018) and Florida Living, staged at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah in 2017.

In 2012 Bas opened The Other Side at the Kunstverein Hannover, the artist's first institutional solo show within Europe. A major survey of the artist's work previously opened at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, in 2007 and toured to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009.

Other significant exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Space Between Needful & Needless, Lehmann Maupin Seoul, South Korea (2025); Hernan Bas: Nightmares & Melancholy, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (2024); Hernan Bas: The First and the Last, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, France (2024); Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists: Vol. II, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA (2023); Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2022); Hernan Bas: Nightlite, Fredric Snitzer, Miami, USA (2021); Hernan Bas, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Hernan Bas: Venetian Blind, Victoria Miro, Venice, Italy (2020); Them, Galerie Perrotin, New York, USA (2019); Works on Paper, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Time Life, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA (2019); On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2017); A Sum of its Parts, Polk Museum of Art, Florida (2016); Tracing Shadows, Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Aquatopia, The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, at Nottingham Contemporary and subsequently travelling to Tate St. Ives (2013–14); TIME, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2013); Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Contemporary Art, Hungary, travelling to Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2012); Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2011); Nothing in the World But Youth, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Busan Biennale, Korea (2008); Like Color in Pictures, Aspen Art Museum (2007); Ideal Worlds - New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2002). Bas’ work was also included in The Collectors, conceived by Elmgreen & Dragset for the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, Venice Biennale (2009).

Works by the artist are included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.