Gallery Perrotin Tokyo in Roppongi, Tokyo, will be holding a solo exhibition of American artist Hernan Bass from January 18th to March 11th.


Hernan Bass was born in Miami, Florida in the southern United States in 1978 and began his career as an artist. He currently lives and works in Detroit and Miami, near Canada. From his childhood, he immersed himself in art and literature books at the library, and was particularly influenced by the aesthetic and decadent literary world of late 19th-century European decadent writers Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans, as well as the Nabis, a group of avant-garde artists active in Paris at the end of the 19th century who advocated the decorative nature of art. This exhibition, titled "Exotic Insects," features new paintings and drawings inspired by the ancient book "Insects Abroad: A Report of Their Structure, Life and Metamorphosis" (published in 1874). Hernan Bass finds this entomology book's poetic descriptions of insects throughout its pages a compelling approach to portraying the highly visible "dandies" of the same period in the 19th century. According to Bass, caricatures of the time portrayed "dandies" as monstrous beings, deviant from the real world, almost like insects. Meanwhile, "Insects Abroad: A Report of Their Structure, Life and Metamorphosis" uses meticulous scientific text to portray even the most repulsive insects as approachable. Similarly, in Bass's paintings, his meticulous depictions elevate these alien figures to a captivating level.