In collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin and Perrotin
With over 30 new artworks in an immersive installation conceived specifically for the Museum, Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) will present The Visitors at Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, in the Dom Pérignon galleries.
Drawing inspiration from Venice, a city uniquely attuned to tourism and continually shaped by its consequences – and also the site of a recent residency undertaken by the artist – Bas has created a new body of work featuring tourists in scenarios both imagined and real. These protagonists – predominantly white, western and male – inhabit a shifting terrain of bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. With the fundamental disconnection between these ‘visitors’ and the worlds they traverse, Bas exposes the absurdity of iconic clichés of tourism such as the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain; dark tourism destinations such as Chernobyl, Alcatraz and the Aokigahara Forest; and tourist traps designed to con, swindle or disappoint.
Bas has been long celebrated for narrative works permeated by humour, decadence, oddities, the occult and layered codes. He explores the intricacies of self-identity through figures poised at moments of transformation, where the ordinary slips into the
extraordinary. In The Visitors, this sensibility turns outward. Like the dandies and flâneurs of Bas’s earlier works, these new figures hover at thresholds: between curiosity and arrogance, encounter and violation, experience and spectacle.
Many of these new figures appear caught in acts of performance or pretence; whether posing, taking photographs or assuming disguise. One of Bas’s tourists claims resident status, another (American) poses as a Canadian and a further visitor to Thailand stages an encounter with a python. In an effect typical of Bas’s keen sense of irony, a sense of affection for his hapless and misguided visitors collides with a lucid indictment of an era defined by globalisation, without cultural or geographical bearings.
Part of this new body of work was created whilst the artist was in residence in Venice, in close contact with the lagoon, its light, its paintings and its tourists. In these paintings, the visitor becomes both painter and painted. In recent decades, the historic city of Venice has suffered from the rise of mass tourism, damaging its monuments, its lagoon, its inhabitants and its history. Venice itself, long shaped by exchange and now strained by mass tourism, becomes both setting and mirror to the works’ concerns. Bas also brings to bear his lifelong understanding of what it is to live alongside tourists in Miami, as well as his own experiences as a first-generation Cuban American, often feeling like a visitor in his own home.
Displayed in an immersive sequence, the canvases will form a continuous visual narrative. Photographic cropping, saturated surfaces and accumulations of telling details – slogans, tattoos, accessories – operate as contemporary vanitas, revealing the moral ambiguities embedded in global mobility. Here, Bas captures a generation adrift – simultaneously searching and self-absorbed – inviting viewers to recognise, within this suspended world, their own reflections.
Elisabetta Barisoni, Director of Ca’ Pesaro and curator of the exhibition, has said:
“In the rooms of the International Gallery of Modern Art of Venice, we will be welcomed by a series of figures that, at first glance, seem to depict youth immersed in the discovery of the world, but instead reveal an absurd, paradoxical, and comic situation. The monumental series represents a vision that is constantly before our eyes — one made up of gullible, voyeuristic tourism that goes beyond the limits of respect for others and, in extreme cases, for human dignity. In works that at first appear to be souvenir photographs or exotic keepsakes, history and memory begin to waver, while the very sense of reality starts to crack.”