Based in Miami, Florida, but keeping an apartment in New York City, Hernan Bas is an artist whose works include video installation, paintings and drawings and express a wide range of interests. His pieces, such as Fleeting Moments and Fragile Moments, include a fascination for kites, which he uses as symbolic vehicles to convey messages about life and death and suicide. In his works, he also uses other items to convey references to the past and changing times such as fallen tree branches, Victorian jewelry, candles and fake hair.

In the summer of 2005, Bas was in residency in Giverny, France at the estate of Claude Monet as a participant in the Artists at Giverny Program. Painting quickly in a post-Impressionist style, he made about 45 works during this period including abstract landscapes on panels, drawings, and paintings of giants, an expression tied to his ongoing expressions of fantasy and mythology.

A series of drawings by Bas in 2004 showing young boys wandering through scary-seeming woods and swamps was described by The New York Times reviewer, Holland Cotter, as a "homoerotic gloss on the Hardy Boys." For a solo gallery exhibition in Miami, Bas did a Slimfast series, using the product's liquid and powder to create graceful-looking young male figures. He used strawberry-flavored Slimfast in his installations.

Bas' career has been very active, especially since his work appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Following that event, he had solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and London, and group shows including Miami and Copenhagen, Denmark; Frankfurt, Germany; and Israel. At the 2005 Art Basel Fair in Switzerland, 13 works by Bas sold within 15 minutes.

Hernan Bas was born in Cuba, one of six children, and as a baby, emigrated to Miami, Florida with his family. He grew up in that city where his father was a performing musician, song writer, and author of books about Cuban baseball. Bas attended magnet art programs in the Miami-Dade public schools and graduated from the New World School of the Arts. He enrolled in Cooper Union School in New York City for several months, but dropped out because of wanting to do his own work and skip over the elementary exercises the school required of beginning students. Shortly after this 'de-enrollment', he took a job with the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, where he learned about Contemporary Art. Working there from 1998 to mid 2000, he installed artwork, and did record keeping and docenting. He became especially fascinated with works exhibited at the Collection by Charles Ray, Robert Gober and Cecily Brown.


Source:
Elisa Turner, "The Hardy Boys Met the Sea Nymphs", ARTnews, January 2006, pp. 110-113

Hernan Bas (b.1978) is a contemporary American painter who lives and works in Miami.

His paintings are influenced by the romantic and decadent legacies of 18th and 19th century art, literature, poetry, and religion. These influences result in canvases that are complex and highly detailed and often portray characters, typically young male figures, nestled among flora and fauna.

Hernan Bas received a degree from the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida in 1996. Solo exhibitions of Bas’ work have been curated by the Rubell Museum, Miami, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and Space, K, Seoul.

Bas’ artwork is found in permanent collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, and Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France.