This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  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
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