The Future is Lush and Lonely: Review of Hernan Bas at Lehman Maupin

Hernan Bas’s show at Lehmann Maupin, up through July 10, is many things; the first adjectives that come to mind are worth-seeing, interesting and ambitious. These scenes of verdant landscape enclosing small figures create a sense of narrative, cataclysmic and lonely, and are visually mesmerizing as your eye tries to take in all the detail of these large canvases.

Ubi Roi

Bas breaks up the landscape with angular planes and covers them in expressive brushwork. There’s a chaotic element to the landscape, which looks like tectonic plates smashing into each other to create contours, and its warring colors.


While the angular planes of the landscape are lushly and loosely painted, this contrasts with his treatment of human figures. They are small in relation to the landscape and tightly delineated. His figures are the more telling than his deceptively loose, chaotic landscapes. You can see it in the hard edges he creates, seemingly by painting in layers over strips of paper that he then pulls off, how precisely controlled the enviorns are.

A Landscape Heard

Bas’s images work from far away, when the wild colors seem more balanced and you get an evocative sense of a landscape in ruin, and up close, where his painting becomes mesmerizingly complex. There are some instances of really beautiful color, like below. Yet I also felt that the angular planes of the landscape, instead of creating depth, pushed everything in the picture to the forefront. Without depth, the complexity becomes dizzying, at times to the composition’s detriment.

As Bas says in an interview with BlackBook,The whole show is based on a newfound interest that I had in Futurism and 1920s Absurdist performance,” and there’s no lack of references to it within the show (e.g. The title of the show, The Dance of the Machine Gun & Other Forms of Unpopular Expression). This conscious use of art history can seem heavy handed, and I think the New York Times might have put it best when, in an article on the artist’s show at BMA that just closed, “The cumulative effect of the exhibition is of a young man still finding himself as an artist.”

The Bagpiper in Exile (or, The Sad Wind)


‘Finding himself’ seems to be a rewarding process for the viewer as well as the artist based on this show. It bodes well that the artist is willing to try new things, as here he to incorporate new elements into his visual language and risk different subject matter (previously homoerotic scenes of young boys, like the show at BMA). Bas is an artist to watch.

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Louise Fishman’s Accomplished Abstractions

If a mark of success is survival, then Louise Fishman, at 70, is in prime form to make her mark in the annals of American abstraction as well as on canvas. Her show at Cheim and Reed, on through May 2, is a great chance to see the accomplished paintings of an artist who has matured over a long career.

As the press release for the exhibition states, “Now seventy years old, Fishman is from a generation of artists that includes Brice Marden (age 70), Mary Heilmann (age 68), Robert Mangold (age 71), Lynda Benglis (age 67), Bill Jensen (age 63), Pat Steir (age 68) and Robert Ryman (age 78).” All of whom just missed the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism and form a second generation who took abstraction different ways.


It’s old hat, if still well-warranted, to point out that Abstract Expressionism’s started out as a boys club that excluded some able female painters who were very much a part of the 1940s American art scene. Talented women were part of the Abstract Expressionism during its first years, but their careers differ from that of their male counterparts. Exemplia gratis: Elaine de Kooning. However, to understand Fishman’s current paintings as important because she is a female who does abstract paintings would take credit from the work itself and ignores the story of how she came to the gestural abstraction she is known for now.

Fishman was not always an abstract painter. An active feminist, her works in the 60s (grid paintings) and early 70s (traditional women’s work, like knitting) eventually led her to embrace a style of painting that was traditionally ‘masculine.’

Fishman’s style of painting is noted for its energy and textures, a process of mark making and layering that creates a densely-worked canvas. The paintings in this show are large and physical. These abstract canvases create a layered world that suggests something lurking underneath. I thought the show a Cheim and Reed was impressive and well-worth a visit.

Q: What is Thursday in the art world?

A: A night of gallery hopping; i.e. openings, wine, people watching, mingling and more.

I have a great list of exciting openings for tonight. I have a great new raincoat and umbrella just in case. Great, right? Except I’ll be hosting my boyfriend’s dad for dinner, which is, of course, lovely, but does not leave time for gallery hopping.

There’s no reason that the list should go to waste though. Enjoy and report back if you can. If not, hopefully I’ll be out there on Friday. Also, if you ever want to check out some openings and aren’t sure where to go, check out Artcards for a great and wide-ranging list of exhibitions. Openings are from 6 to 8 p.m.

This is my short list of things to see tonight. The long list occurs as you’re strolling through Chelsea and spot a crowd or a work that catches you’re eye. Hopefully, I’ll catch those shows and the ones listed below tomorrow.

The shows listed below are not to be missed, at least so I suspect/heard through the grapevine. Except for the last one, an installation, this list provides a very painterly tour of Chelsea. There are galleries outside of Chelsea (and I do want to write about them soon) but you can only fit so much into a day, right?

Am I missing a good show? Is something cool coming up? Tell me!