Philip Haas (born 1954) is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 2012 sculpture exhibition "The Four Seasons" and his 1995 film Angels and Insects.
He began his career as a documentary film maker, directing
ten profiles of unusual artists through early 1990s with the theme
"Magicians of the Earth," commissioned by the Centre Georges
Pompidou.
His feature films include Angels and Insects, set in
Victorian England, which was nominated for an Academy Award and the Cannes Film
Festival Palme d'Or, Up at the Villa, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham
novella, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas, The
Situation, a political thriller set in Iraq, released in 2006, and the
highly-regarded The Music of Chance (1993).
In 2008, the Sonnabend Gallery of New York featured a film
installation called The Butcher's Shop, commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum,
in which Haas recreated the space depicted in Annibale Carracci’s 1582 painting
of the same name. In 2010, he expanded this series to include works by Ensor
and Tiepolo. His exhibition of film installations at the Kimbell Art Museum,
"Butchers, Dragons, Gods and Skeletons," was listed by TIME magazine
as one of the top ten museum shows of 2009
Retrospectives of his art films have been held at the Tate
Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Lincoln Center in New
York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for this body of work. He
has taught in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. In 2008 and
2010, he had one-man shows of paintings and film installations at the Sonnabend
Gallery. in New York City. Haas's monumental fiberglass sculpture Winter (after
Arcimboldo) was unveiled in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in
September, 2010, before traveling in 2011 to the Piazza del Duomo in Milan and
the Garden of Versailles. In 2012,
in a spectacular transformation that is typical of his
work, Haas created a group of large-scale, fifteen-foot-high, fibre-glass
sculptures, inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Renaissance paintings of the four
seasons, comprising Spring, Summer, Autumn, and including Winter. The colossal
size of Haas's sculpture accentuates the visual puzzle of natural
forms—flowers, ivy, moss, fungi, vegetables, fruit, trees, bark, branches,
twigs, leaves—as they are recycled to form four human portraits, each
representing an individual season. The result is at once earthy, fanciful and
exuberant—a commentary on Arcimboldo's style and a work of art in its own
right. These sculptures were first seen in the garden of the Dulwich Picture
Gallery in the United Kingdom in the
summer of 2012, before embarking on a three-year tour of American museums and
botanical gardens.
The New York Botanical Garden exhibits Philip Haas's monumental sculpture series Four Seasons
Internationally-renowned contemporary artist
Philip Haas is the subject of a one person show, titled Four Seasons, at The
New York Botanical Garden May 18–October 27, 2013. Haas’s work is distinguished
by meticulously rendered tableaux seeking to illuminate the source of
creativity, often through contemporary interpretations of masterworks from the
history of art. In Four Seasons, Haas has created four monumental,
15-foot-tall, portrait busts that reference each of the seasons and are
displayed in the round. In the artist’s exploration of the past, reinterpreted
in the present, Haas references classical Italian Renaissance portraiture, with
roots in the celebrated Four Seasons series created by Renaissance master
Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Haas gives viewers a fresh perspective on the classical
form by blowing up the scale to colossal proportions. What has formerly been a
two-dimensional experience—the painted portrait—is given new context through
this series as viewers are able to walk around the sculptures, to see the
subjects from all sides, rather than simply in profile as with a painting.
Further, as in Arcimboldo’s work from the 1500s, flesh, hair, and human
features have been replaced with organic material native to each season. In
Winter, for example, the skin of the subject is represented through oversized
forms of bark and hair by gnarled tree limbs and ivy. Spring features a riot of
flower forms in bright hues arranged to represent a human portrait. The
placement of the four sculptures within the symmetrical courtyard of the Enid
A. Haupt Conservatory has the busts facing one another in a square
configuration, creating a dialog between not only the four “subjects,” but also
the viewer who can walk around and in between the works, creating an involving
and personal experience. Haas comments, “Whether I’m working in painting,
sculpture, or film, what fascinates me is the idea of transformation. Through
the Four Seasons, I am re-contextualizing the world of classical Renaissance
portraiture using the transformative elements of scale, material, and dimensionality,
thereby altering the viewer’s perspective.” The New York Botanical Garden Chief
Executive Officer and The William C. Steere Sr. President Gregory Long states,
“We are thrilled to present Philip Haas’s remarkable Four Seasons here at The
New York Botanical Garden. This body of work is ideal for the garden as it
speaks to the present, while reflecting on the past. The contemporary forms
rooted in the history of art will resonate not only with our core audience but
also those passionate about contemporary art.” Haas, in marrying sculpture,
painting, film, and architecture, has created a contemporary visual vocabulary
all his own. He describes his process as “sculpting by thinking.” Haas’s
groundbreaking artwork has been featured by museums including the National
Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas),
Dulwich Picture Gallery (United Kingdom), and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris).
In the public realm, his work has been exhibited in the Piazza del Duomo
(Milan) and the Gardens of Versailles (France). He is the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as other awards. He has taught in the visual
arts and creative writing programs at Princeton University. He lives and works
in New York and London.
Philip Haas at Dulwich Picture Gallery: Seasonal vegetables and the sculpture renaissance
Sarah Crompton finds Philip Haas's installations at Dulwich
Picture Gallery peculiar and impressive.
By Sarah Crompton 02 Jul 2012 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9365749/Philip-Haas-at-Dulwich-Picture-Gallery-Seasonal-vegetables-and-the-sculpture-renaissance.html
As storms lashed the North of the country while London
sweltered in a heatwave, it seemed a good moment to pop into the Dulwich
Picture Gallery and take a look at four bizarre sculptures that have appeared
in its grounds.
The American artist Philip Haas has taken it upon himself to
make a quartet of towering, painted, fibreglass sculptures inspired by Giuseppe
Arcimboldo’s Renaissance paintings of the four seasons, built from the pieces
of fruit, flora and fauna that are appropriate to the time of year.
So Summer is all bright colours and healthy leaves; he has a
rose for his chin and cheeks, and a garland of flowers in his hair. Winter
shows his colours with locks of tumbling ivy, a crown of ragged branches and
moss on his chin. Spring, on the other hand, features an artichoke for a
buttonhole, and corn pokes out from his collar; with his marrow of a nose and
aubergines hanging from his hair, he looks a bit like a sculptural dish of
primavera pasta. Autumn is distinguished by caterpillars for eyebrows and
blackberries for the pupils of his eyes.
At least I think that is right. Arcimboldo, and Haas in
turn, seem to me to use a fair amount of artistic licence with their fruit and
veg, which introduced an element of seasonal confusion in my mind: until I
spotted the blackberries, I thought Autumn was Spring.
The whole thing is both peculiar and impressive to fall
across in the garden of this elegant south London gallery. It seems to be part
of a trend for putting big sculptures in public places. I don’t always like the
work – Elmgreen and Dragset’s Boy on a Rocking Horse makes me shudder every time
I walk through Trafalgar Square – but I do applaud the impulse to liven up our
cities by putting it there.
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