“Hernan Bas: The space between needful & needless” at Lehmann Maupin Seoul
By Lehmann Maupin
*presented by Lehmann Maupin
HERNAN BAS, The hummingbird enthusiast, 2025, acrylic on linen, 127 × 101.6 cm. Photo by Silvia Ros. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York/Seoul/London.
Miami-based artist Hernan Bas returns to Seoul with his latest solo exhibition, “The Space Between Needful & Needless,” on view at Lehmann Maupin Seoul from April 10 to May 31, 2025. Featuring twelve new paintings, this exhibition marks a significant milestone as Bas’s first solo show at the gallery’s Seoul location, following his well-received museum debut in Korea at Space K in 2021. “The Space Between Needful & Needless” also follows closely after “The Conceptualists,” his solo exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida—his hometown and an enduring source of inspiration in his work.
One of the most celebrated figurative painters of our generation, Bas is known for his narrative works that weave together adolescent adventures and the paranormal with classical poetry, religious stories, mythology, and literature, presenting a contemporary version of History Painting. For Bas, each individual painting becomes an in-depth investigation into a singular critical subject, often providing a unique perspective on American subcultures. In his latest series, Bas draws inspiration from his recent travels throughout Florida and his obscure interests, turning to stories that have been on the creative back-burner for years. Departing from the world of “The Conceptualists,” which Bas developed over nearly two years, the exhibition reveals one of the artist’s most personal bodies of work to date and his mastery of visual storytelling.
After finishing “The Conceptualists” in 2023, Bas became fascinated by everyday jobs, objects, and behaviors that teeter between necessity, uselessness, and absurdity. Taking his wry sense of humor to new depths, Bas embeds each new painting with satire and irony as a means of probing prevalent yet useless human behaviors. His focus on frivolity and excess mirrors the work of 19th century writers such as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose work has had a formative impact on Bas’s practice over the years.
HERNAN BAS, Round one (yo-yo world championships), 2025, acrylic on linen, 127 × 101.6 cm. Photo by Silvia Ros. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York/Seoul/London.
As the first painting that he completed in this series, A needless moment (2025) serves as a jumping off point for his exploration of “needless things.” Inspired by photographs taken in the dense, mosquito-laden swamps of Northern Florida, Bas explores how an object, such as a mosquito-net hat, becomes futile in the face of the owner’s choices, namely his decision to wander the swamp shirtless. The Florida landscape continues to be a source of inspiration, as seen in the work The 6 toed cats’ caretaker (Hemingway house) (2025), where Bas sheds light on the caretakers of the Hemingway House in the Florida Keys whose sole responsibility is the care of the house's rare cats. At first glance, the job might seem superfluous, but the cats—descendants of Hemingway’s own pets—have become a key part of the house’s attraction.
Other works in the exhibition expand on Bas’s ongoing interest in the occult, such as The pet psychic’s dilemma (2025) where he imagines a pet psychic summoned to investigate a hen that has inexplicably begun laying black eggs. In Holiday Spirits (2025), Bas presents a pun-filled scene in which a boy dressed in black sits in front of a Christmas tree with a half-opened Ouija board. The board, traditionally used to communicate with the dead, offers a stark contrast to the usual symbols of birth and joy associated with Christmas.
With Bas’s rich compositions and tongue-in-cheek narratives, “The space between needful & needless” invites viewers to re-examine the meaning that we prescribe to certain traditions or objects and the fine line between what is truly necessary and what is useless in life and art.
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Studio portrait of the artist. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York/Seoul/London.
Hernan Bas (b. 1978, Miami, Florida) is a Miami-based artist known for his evocative, narrative-driven paintings. He studied at the New World School of the Arts and has exhibited widely, with solo shows at the Bass Museum of Art, Yuz Museum, Space K, Rubell Museum, and Kunstverein Hannover. His work has also been featured in major group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, and Saatchi Gallery.
Bas’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; Space K, Seoul, South Korea; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
