Miami-based artist Hernan Bas, at the Brooklyn Museum, NY

Hernan Bas. The Blue Line, 2005-2006. Acrylic, gouache, water-based oil and collage on paper. 12 x 10 in. Rubell Family Collection, Miami

February 27 - May 24, 2009

Thirty-eight works of art in various media from one of Miami’s most celebrated young artists, Hernan Bas, will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. “Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection” draws from art collected over the past ten years by the Rubell family. This exhibition will be on view from February 27 to May 24, 2009.

Hernan Bas has a great fascination with historical painting, popular fiction, Goth culture, and nineteenth century dandyism. Using these influences, his paintings often depict androgynous boys on the edge of adulthood in narratives drawn from Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent period. Inspired by these authors, Bas creates his own romantic mythologies from a perspective that explores masculinity and gay culture.

Designed like the chapters of a book, this exhibition presents the development of Bas in a manner that can be read symbolically and literally.

Hernan Bas was born in Miami in 1978; he is a graduate of The New World School of the Arts in Miami. His work has been seen in numerous solo and group shows and is in private and public collections throughout the Unites States, among them the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

“Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection” was organized by Mark Coetzee, Director of the Rubell Family Collection; the Brooklyn Museum presentation is coordinated by Charles Desmarais, Deputy Director for Art.

Further information, www.brooklynmuseum.org