Why Hernan Bas is in the Design 100

Hernan Bas works from Miami, the city he grew up in and the city his paintings keep returning to, even when the settings look invented. His canvases follow a recurring cast of young male protagonists, dreamy and watchful, set in landscapes that tip from ordinary into uncanny. The debt is literary as much as painterly: Bas has named Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire and Huysmans among his influences, and the Symbolist strain of nineteenth century decadence sits under the pictures as clearly as any brushwork does.

That body of work found an early audience. Bas appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and his paintings now sit in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum and the Rubell Museum in Miami, which gave his work a dedicated presentation of its own in 2007. Two decades on, the subject matter has not changed so much as deepened — one Florida-raised painter’s sustained argument that the strange and the beautiful were never far apart to begin with.