Hernan Bas, Conceptual Artist #37
Booth U16, Art Basel Unlimited, 16–22 June 2025
Presented in association with Lehmann Maupin and Perrotin
Presented at Art Basel Unlimited, this monumental triptych concludes Hernan Bas’s major series The Conceptualists.
Completed in 2023, Conceptual Artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed) is the final painting from The Conceptualists, a major series of works by Hernan Bas featuring imagined protagonists engaged in obsessive pursuits that might be rationalised or even championed when framed as ‘conceptual art.’ The monumental triptych depicts an artist in his studio surrounded by paraphernalia referencing many of the creators and their peculiar practices explored throughout the series. Bas adds a further layer of humour in describing the figure in this work as an artist who ‘exclusively paints portraits of Conceptual Artists who have never existed.’ Set within Bas’s own studio, it brings the series to a close, acting as an index of sorts and revealing Bas’s own hand in devising his cast of artistic counterparts.
Hernan 1
Acrylic and pencil on linen
Triptych, overall:
274.3 x 640 cm
108 x 252 in
Hernan Bas, Conceptual Artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed), 2023
More info‘I’m making my conceptual art through the surrogates, basically. Because, obviously, all of the ideas are mine, even the ones made up by these artists. It’s a way for me to cheat and just make a list of funny – or not always funny, but interesting – ways to make conceptual art myself.’ — Hernan Bas in conversation with Isabelle Graw, published in Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass, Miami Beach, 2023–2024
Installation view, Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, 2023–2024. Photography: Zaire Aranguren
Hernan 2
The work concluded the major exhibition Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, held at The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, December 2023–May 2024. Writing in the catalogue for that exhibition, Blake Oetting notes, ‘conceptual art’s status as painterly content in Bas’s work poses a challenge to its historical evasion of this most traditional of media. Indeed, in this series, conceptualism is paradoxically materialized through Bas’s work as a painter, probing the boundaries between medium and message, mark-making, and cognition. Reconsidering the title of this series, one might reasonably ask whether the artist names not only his subjects but the paintings themselves as the “Conceptualists” in question. This possibility is driven home by Bas’s large-scale painting Conceptual Artist #37, which shows the protagonist in the process of depicting the other artists that make up this series, offering a mise-en-abyme summation of the group at large (not to mention a surrogate self-portrait).’
Oetting continues, ‘With Conceptual Artist #37, for instance, where his subjects appear together as a kind of constellated family, each of his fictional artists is revealed – in what the artist recently called a “Wizard of Oz moment where the emerald curtain parts”— to have been produced within a coherent system of production.’
‘With Conceptual Artist #37… where his subjects appear together as a kind of constellated family, each of his fictional artists is revealed – in what the artist recently called a “Wizard of Oz moment where the emerald curtain parts” – to have been produced within a coherent system of production.’ — Blake Oetting, published in the exhibition catalogue for Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass, Miami Beach, 2023–2024
‘Bas creates a memorial to his own process of crafting each character. #37 replicates his studio down to the benches and paint stand, “doodads” and materials, and even the overspray markings on the wall that bear traces of other paintings from the series.’ — Liz Munsell, published in the exhibition catalogue for Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass, Miami Beach, 2023–2024
Liz Munsell, writing about the layers of reference in The Conceptualists, comments, ‘In the massive, three-paneled, concluding work of the series, Conceptual Artist #37 (he exclusively paints portraits of conceptual artists who have never existed), Bas creates a memorial to his own process of crafting each character. #37 replicates his studio down to the benches and paint stand, “doodads” and materials, and even the overspray markings on the wall that bear traces of other paintings from the series. This full-on scenography can be forensically analyzed like the scene of a crime: the work is chock-full of evidence…’
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 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 (2021-2022); Hernan Bas, Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2020-2022); 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 (2013-2014); 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.