The Unexplained

Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th floor
February 27 - May 24, 2009
Exhibition Curator: Mark Coetzee, Director, Rubell Family Collection
Brooklyn Museum presentation coordinated by Judy Kim, Curator of Exhibitions, Brooklyn Museum

A graduate of New World School of the Arts High School, Hernan Bas (b. 1978) has gone on to become one of Miami's most celebrated artists. His work indulges in the production of romantic, melancholic and old world imagery, and makes reference to Wilde, Huysmans and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent period in literature. This exhibition consists of 38 works spanning a decade, and includes examples from each of his series completed thus far. Designed like the chapters of a book, the exhibition presents the development of this young artist in such a manner to allow for symbolic, literal and poetical readings.

The Rubell family has built its collection to show an artist's oeuvre in significant depth, and here is no exception. The Rubell Family Collection has the largest holding of Bas' work to date, encompassing all his media of choice: video, drawing, painting and installation. Drawing from these huge holdings, this exhibition, with Mark Coetzee as curator, can be called an early career overview.

Bound in the works' romantic storytelling, art history references, grand gesture and melding of the conceptual, one still feels a strong sense of humanity. Humanism. Real stories told of real boys with deeply held feelings. An artist expressing his experience, his history, his desires, his world, and his place in that world right now--both as artist and individual.