Hernan Bas talks to Whitewall about his exhibition The Visitors in Venice

Hernan Bas reflects on fantasy, storytelling, identity, and the psychologically charged worlds that have shaped his practice. By Ana Novi

For more than two decades, Hernan Bas has constructed worlds suspended between seduction and estrangement. Across paintings populated by drifting adolescents, melancholic dandies, occult wanderers, and emotionally unmoored protagonists, the Miami-born artist has developed a visual language in which fantasy, decadence, humour, and unease become tools for examining identity itself. His figures often appear caught at thresholds-between youth and self-knowledge, performance and vulnerability, beauty and disquiet-inhabiting scenes that feel at once cinematic, literary, and psychologically charged.

In "The Visitors," on view at Ca' Pesaro-International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice from May 7 through August 30, 2026, Hernan Bas turns that narrative sensibility toward the contemporary figure of the tourist. Created partly during the artist's residency in Venice, the exhibition brings together more than 30 new paintings in an immersive installation conceived specifically for the museum. Its protagonists-predominantly young Western men-move through bucket-list destinations, sacred spaces, dark tourism sites, staged encounters, and spectacles of consumption, revealing the uneasy boundary between curiosity and entitlement, experience and performance.

Image: Portrait of Hernan Bas, 2026, photo © Danilo Scarpati, courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro.

August 17 2026