NYAB Event - de la Haba "Dawn of a New Era"

de la Haba "Dawn of a New Era"

NY Studio Gallery

This event has ended.

This exhibit by a New York born-and-raised bad boy paradoxically riffs on the richest artist in the world and opens on tax day. In response to Damien Hirst’s recent exhibit “The End of An Era," where the conceptualist master was panned by the press for his technical abilities, multi-media artist and painter’s painter de la Haba has created new and never-before-seen oils depicting spring and renewal, rebirth, procreation, and apocalyptic imagery. The work fills a gap that New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently identified in her article “Post-Minimal to the Max.” “What’s missing,” she states, “is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned."

The source imagery for de la Haba’s large scale oils is both the figure, de la Haba himself and his two young sons, and the epic Equus Maximus, made of three life-size taxidermy show-horses in full Vegas dance-hall regalia. Two are gray mares lying upon a broken casino table kicking under a rearing black stallion, all three displaying exaggerated sex organs. This emotionally provoking installation as well as the incarnations that follow are a well concerted bridge between Conceptualism, Eroticism, representation and most importantly perhaps, painting.