At the Aventura Mall in the Louis Vuitton store, Hernan Bas has created a sculptural installation specifically for the luxury brand’s location. Using canvas covered in Vuitton’s iconic monogram symbols, Bas made up bundles — hobo sacks, really, or bindles — and attached them to birch branches, to come up with A Traveler. He’s playing with two extreme ends of travel accessories — a Vuitton suitcase and a bag on a stick.
It’s one of the numerous places across the globe that the Miami-bred artist will be shown this year, signaling the meteoric rise of the 34-year-old, former New World School of the Arts student.
Over the next six months alone, Bas, best known for his beautifully brushed, dreamy, melancholy paintings, will blanket three continents with his work. Until April 21, the major New York gallery Lehmann Maupin is exhibiting a solo show of his newest paintings, called “Occult Contemporary.” Also through April, the Kunstverein museum in Hannover, Germany, is giving the artist a survey of works spanning the last five years. Then he will pop up in a solo show in Seoul, South Korea at the PKM Gallery, which has on its roster such giants in contemporary art as Olafur Eliasson and Bruce Nauman. Bas will return to Europe, to Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and wind up back in Miami for a new show at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery.
These are significant shows at trend-setting locations. Most artists could only dream of just one of these exhibits in one year.
Bas is viewing it all with a large dose of humility. “The exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover — from what I’ve been told — has been received rather well by the local community, It has been a while since the Kunstverein has mounted a classic, traditional painting show and the public has seemingly embraced it.”
So what is it about this hometown talent that has caught so many eyes, leading to his work to catch on fire? From people near and far, the simple answer is this: Bas is a painter’s painter, whose technique, color palette, skill and story lines jump from the frame immediately and attract the viewer.
But to love it, people first had to see it.
The director of the powerhouse London gallery Victoria Miro, Glenn Scott Wright, ran into work from Bas back in 2002, when the Rubell family of the Rubells showed off examples of their latest acquisitions to him.
“I went out to dinner with Don, Mera and Jason Rubell, who brought a whole selection of works on paper they had just acquired and spread them out on the table in a Japanese restaurant,” he recalls. “I remember worrying we might get some soy sauce on them. I loved the work and called Hernan.”
Wright says Bas was hard to pursue, but he persisted, and that would result in a huge breakthrough for Bas — a solo show at Victoria Miro in 2005. “The response in London and throughout Europe has been wholly enthusiastic from the very first moment we showed him,” Wright says.
That special collecting relationship with the Rubells would pay off again a few years later, with Bas’ museum show, “Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009. In between those two, Bas had already become a Miami favorite through his shows at Snitzer, the local gallerist who has known him and his work since his New World days. “The bottom line is, he is a masterful painter,” Snitzer says. Last December, Snitzer included a huge canvas from Bas at his booth at Art Basel Miami Beach (Snitzer has been one of the few local galleries in the fair throughout the years), prominently displayed on the outer wall, which became a Basel talking point.
via miamiherald.com
