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Introduction
Victoria Miro is delighted to present TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), an exhibition of new paintings by Hernan Bas.
This new body of work is set in places of retail where, as comedy, tragedy and life in general tell us, minor characters assume leading dramatic roles. The title, TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), suggests moments illuminated by theatrical spotlight. Here, then, are actors in the theatre of, usually, suburban commerce poised for an encounter that seems every bit as electric as the hush before a revered thespian enters the stage.
This mercantile world takes us to stores and stands of different kinds, as well as to the seaside. Several works were triggered, Proust-like, by childhood memories. Yet it also extends to the hallowed environs of the contemporary art gallery – and here we’re reminded that Bas has often traded in the self-reflexive, conjuring words such as ‘meta’ long before they slipped into common parlance. The title First choice (two artists, a dealer and a collector) sets up a familiar artworld dynamic, only to wrongfoot us with the realisation that the artists depicted in the painting are not the humans.
Elsewhere, Bas deploys (mis)directional cues, skewering expectations while multiple readings and meanings occur – between seller and product, subject and object. Whether we identify with the salesman or as the potential customer, each encounter brings its own dynamic as we negotiate gestures and goods; noticing, say, the wilting flowers and miserly reduction offered by The prodigal son (3pm, farmers market), or weighing up the trade-off between candy and cavities in The tooth fairy.
These moments often point to greater losses – of natural resources in the oceanic plunder depicted in He sells sea shells by the sea shore or, more generally, the demise of mall culture and the specialist, one-on-one performance of the salesman. We might recognise the assistant’s froideur in Catching the scent on a sale as being simply of a type while, for Bas, the often maligned ‘perfume model’ spritzing people as they run the gauntlet from entrance to escalator is ‘a character who will be lost to time, a paperboy with a bottle of Chanel N°5.’ So, there is empathy, sympathy and nostalgia, as well as bright humour, in these works, pointing to a world in which we may well come to lament the dearth of a salesman.
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Works
06Hernan Bas
Hernan Bas is celebrated for works that, permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence and loaded with codes and double-meanings, point to 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 concurrent movements in the visual arts, earlier paintings by the artist hinge on characters captured at various thresholds – between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience, public and private realms. Situated within a shifting terrain of interior and exterior spaces, these paintings are often grounded in the iconography of the flâneur and the dandy, usually portrayed alone or in small groups, and marry flamboyant subject matter with a refined touch to reinterpret various categories of classical painting from a Queer perspective. More recently, in his acclaimed series The Conceptualists, Bas followed a new theme, in which his protagonists engage in a variety of obsessive pursuits that, deemed strange under everyday circumstances, might be rationalised or even championed when considered as ‘conceptual art’.
Bas’ paintings often appear as if suspended in time. However, the stillness at the heart of his work is one of calculated ambiguity, held in counterpoint to the transportive effects – of literature, beauty, the supernatural – experienced by his subjects and, by proxy, us as viewers.
About the Artist
Hernan Bas, born in Miami, Florida in 1978, lives and works in Miami, Florida.
The artist’s recent solo institutional exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Visitors, Ca’ Pesaro, Venice, Italy (2026); Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA (2023); Hernan Bas: Choose Your Own Adventure, Space K, Seoul, South Korea; Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai, China (2021–22); Hernan Bas, Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2020–22); Hernan Bas: A Brief Intermission, CAC Málaga, Spain (2018) and Florida Living, staged at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah in 2017.
In 2012 Bas opened The Other Side at the Kunstverein Hannover, the artist's first institutional solo show within Europe. A major survey of the artist's work previously opened at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, in 2007 and toured to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009.
Other significant exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Space Between Needful & Needless, Lehmann Maupin Seoul, South Korea (2025); Hernan Bas: Nightmares & Melancholy, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (2024); Hernan Bas: The First and the Last, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, France (2024); Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists: Vol. II, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA (2023); Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2022); Hernan Bas: Nightlite, Fredric Snitzer, Miami, USA (2021); Hernan Bas, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Hernan Bas: Venetian Blind, Victoria Miro, Venice, Italy (2020); Them, Galerie Perrotin, New York, USA (2019); Works on Paper, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Time Life, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA (2019); On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2017); A Sum of its Parts, Polk Museum of Art, Florida (2016); Tracing Shadows, Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Aquatopia, The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, at Nottingham Contemporary and subsequently travelling to Tate St. Ives (2013-14); TIME, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2013); Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Contemporary Art, Hungary, travelling to Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2012); Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2011); Nothing in the World But Youth, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Busan Biennale, Korea (2008); Like Color in Pictures, Aspen Art Museum (2007); Ideal Worlds - New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2002). Bas’ work was also included in The Collectors, conceived by Elmgreen & Dragset for the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, Venice Biennale (2009).
Works by the artist are included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
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