Miami-based painter Hernan Bas’s vitrine-lined library in his Little Havana studio area is overflowing with curiosities and bibelots. But currently, the obsessive collector has slowed down. A bit. “I ran out of space,” says the 44-year-old, ruefully. “Plus my boyfriend, Peter, was sort of done with my maximalist approach to life.”
Across the highest of the cupboards marches a menagerie of taxidermy birds and a pig-like javelina. Encased inside are varied discovered pictures, a classic fighter-pilot masks from the Nineteen Thirties, a ceramic Loch Ness monster and a shelf of German papier-mâché Halloween pumpkins from the 1800s. “I think I had 19 of them, but then my brother got me one for Christmas last year and it didn’t fit in the cabinet. You reach a limit. Like, how many ghost photos do you need? I have eight, that’s enough.” These collections of “oddities” and “weird trinkets” are all tied into Bas’s idiosyncratic creative universe. The pumpkins characteristic in one in all Bas’s work from 2014, alongside ghosts made out of mattress sheets.
For the previous 20 years, Bas has created intricate and intriguing work of winsome younger males, normally in fantastical or surreal settings. They have various from vibrantly lush, bird-strewn Florida landscapes (Tropical Depression, 2015) to rooms of Memphis Milano design furnishings (Memphis Living, 2014). Each encompasses a lexicon of curious motifs: flamingoes and snakes and spooky homes; a shark or an enormous clam shell.
“If I need a vase for the background, I’ll literally go to 1stdibs and find one,” says Bas. Other occasions, his analysis takes him elsewhere. “A couple of years ago, I was making a painting that involved a guy holding a hammerhead shark, which led me to all these weird Pinterest pages called Hot Guys Holding Fish… completely clothed hot guys. Holding fish.”
Bas’s new exhibition has simply opened at Victoria Miro. The artist first confirmed with the London gallery in 2004 – the identical 12 months he was included within the prestigious Whitney Biennial in New York, then the youngest artist in its historical past. Today his work is in museum collections throughout the US and he’s represented by a number of heavyweight galleries, together with Perrotin and Lehmann Maupin. “He’s just got better and better as a painter,” says Glenn Scott Wright, a director at Victoria Miro. “When we were talking about this new show, Hernan said, ‘I want to do a series of large, museum-quality paintings’ – and that’s what he’s done.”
The new exhibition works are each a continuation of his follow and a departure. The male figures stay on the cusp of manhood, however there’s much less angst, much less languor. His imagined characters are forged as artists in a collection titled The Conceptualists. Gently teasing in regards to the characters’ high-minded creative pursuits (resembling solely portray with water from Niagara Falls), the works are amusing however not mocking, arch however tender.
Each character in The Conceptualists has a historical past. When Bas talks about them, it’s as if they’re individuals he is aware of. “He’s really into Egyptology,” he says of Conceptual Artist #5, who spends his time gilding his dying houseplants. “I literally have dreams about these characters and what they would do – and I realised that they had been getting more and more involved in eccentric activities. It dawned on me that if you just called them artists, they’d get a free pass to be as eccentric as they please.”
In an accompanying limited-edition ebook, artist and author Linda Yablonsky has created additional backstories. “I basically gave her carte blanche,” says Bas of the texts that think about names, histories and habits for the figures. “Sometimes I just gave her the title of the painting and she ran with it. In a way, the book becomes a conceptual project in and of itself.” A key inspiration for the brand new work was the 2019 mock-documentary Waiting for the Artist. “It’s Cate Blanchett as Marina Abramović, and it is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says Bas. In his personal mild dig at efficiency artwork, Conceptual Artist #9 creates a car-park stage set of do-it-yourself spaceships, whereas #8 has a land-based follow of marbling countryside puddles with meals colouring.
Bas’s personal creative journey started in upstate Florida. Both his mom and his musician father emigrated from Cuba to the US. One of six siblings, he spent his first six years dwelling in a spot he refers to as “a bizarre, backwards world of middle-of-nowhere woods that informed a lot of my weird interests in the paranormal. I dragged that with me in spirit to Miami.” At highschool, he studied life drawing and portray, “but I became more of a photo geek”, he says. He went to artwork school in New York, however was requested to depart after a time period for not turning up. “I think I’d had my fill,” he remembers, “and, being a little Holden Caulfield weirdo, I just wanted to do my own thing.” Back in Miami – “I was broke and had nowhere else to go” – and with out entry to a pictures studio, he started to attract.
“At that time, he was incredibly shy,” remembers Scott Wright, who was launched to Bas’s work within the late ’90s by main Miami collectors the Rubells. “Usually if I call an unknown, unsigned artist and say I’d like to come to their studio, they jump at it. But with Hernan, it took about two years to get hold of him, and then when he finally agreed to meet me, it was at a snooker bar in downtown Miami, at midnight. It was the weirdest studio visit. It was a whole process to get to know him and to look at the work.”
The star of this new exhibition, suggests Scott Wright, is the practically 5m-wide diptych titled Conceptual Artist #7. “Compositionally, it’s an amazing painting,” he says of the cat-strewn inside scene that alludes to Andy Warhol’s Fifties artist ebook 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, and centres on a person dyeing one of many cats blue. “In my mind, this guy’s obsessed – as am I to some extent – with that book,” says Bas, whose extra Warhol references embody a Brillo field and a pink couch – the kind on which Warhol was usually photographed on the Factory. The portray’s silver-leafed home windows are a homage to the silver partitions of the well-known New York hangout.
Some of Bas’s work fizzes with an erotic undertone. While a few of his earlier collection have explicitly explored the queer expertise, he provides: “I don’t necessarily always think of the characters as gay, although people are wont to say that.” He has talked prior to now about how, rising up, he developed “a weird connection between otherworldly and paranormal activity and homosexuality – the idea of being of the other world in a bizarre way.” Of the brand new work he says, “There’s a bit of semi-autobiography in all of them.”
Bas’s phrases in his artist’s assertion might equally be stated of himself: “My characters have entered into a phase of self-acceptance. Their unusual interests aren’t in the shadows any more, and they appear to be comfortable in their curious self-made worlds.” It’s a change that stems, he says, from the dying of his mom in 2020. “I just had this moment of, like, consequences be damned. Risks are the name of the game. I think I can still push myself a lot more.”
Next up is a present at Lehmann Maupin in New York, which opens on 11 May. For the primary time, Bas will proceed this collection in a brand new set of work. “I’ve been wanting to do this series for so long that I have a huge backlog of ideas,” says Bas, who’s in his studio from round 11am to 7pm most days. He’s at the moment renovating his Miami house – a Nineteen Thirties constructing on the sting of Little Havana – and not too long ago completed renovating the Vancouver home he and his companion purchased in March this 12 months.
In phrases of design, Bas says he’s leaning in direction of “a lot of Shaker furniture” in the meanwhile. “And, like most art kids, I’m still a sucker for all that Memphis Milano ’80s stuff.” In his studio there’s a circular-shaped First chair by Memphis designer Michele De Lucchi, whereas on the wall there’s a Warhol silkscreen of Joseph Beuys. He additionally has just a few particular person prints from Warhol’s 25 Cats, whereas the ebook as a complete is on his collector’s wishlist. “Now, if I splurge on anything, it’s typically art,” says Bas. His newest buy, from a “random auction house”, is a “weird crown by a self-taught artist called Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who lived in a shack in Wisconsin and made little thrones out of chicken bones and stuff like that. It’s really strange.” It definitely feels prefer it has a spot within the Hernan Bas universe. But unusual, as we each agree, is certainly an excellent factor.
Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists is at Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1, till 14 January. Paintings, $325,000-$750,000; works on paper, $30,000-$60,000
