'For each of these tourist paintings, he has gone deep down a rabbit hole of research, coming up for air sometimes aghast at the human folly he has discovered. “I love storytelling,” he says. “I thought I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a painter at certain points in my life. When I sit around with these characters I have to make entire backstories about their lives that no one will ever know about, that only exist in my brain.”'
'For the current series, each painting is accompanied by a little text – sometimes invented by Bas, sometimes spliced together from, for example, real TripAdvisor reviews culled from the web. “Some of them were too funny not to use,” he says.'
Image: installation view, Hernan Bas: The VisitorsCa’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice
7 May–30 August 2026
© Hernan Bas
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro
May 5 2026
