Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas is a Detroit-based expressionist artist. His figurative paintings have been awarded by Rerna Hort Foundation of New York, Columbia University, Cleveland Institute of Art, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

He is celebrated for works that, permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence and laden with codes and double meanings, explore 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 related movements in the visual arts, Bas’s earlier paintings centre on characters captured at various thresholds – between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience, public and private realms. Situated within shifting terrains of interior and exterior spaces, these works often draw on the iconography of the flâneur and the dandy, typically depicted alone or in small groups. Flamboyant subject matter is paired with a refined touch, reinterpreting classical painting genres from a Queer perspective. More recently, in his acclaimed series “The Conceptualists”, Bas introduced a new theme in which his protagonists pursue various obsessions that, while strange in everyday life, may be rationalised – or even celebrated – when reframed as “conceptual art”.

Bas’s paintings often appear suspended in time. Yet the stillness at their core is a calculated ambiguity, held in tension with the transportive experiences – of literature, beauty, the supernatural – encountered by his subjects and, by extension, by us as viewers.