HERNAN BAS. The Visitors
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Dom Pérignon galleries
From May 7th to August 30th 2026
In collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin and Perrotin
With over 30 new artworks in an immersive installation conceived specifically for the Museum, Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) will present The Visitors at Ca’ Pesaro.
Drawing inspiration from Venice, a city uniquely attuned to tourism and continually shaped by its consequences – and also the site of a recent residency undertaken by the artist – Bas has created a new body of work featuring tourists in scenarios both imagined and real. These protagonists – predominantly white, western and male – inhabit a shifting terrain of bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. With the fundamental disconnection between these ‘visitors’ and the worlds they traverse, Bas exposes the absurdity of iconic clichés of tourism such as the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain; dark tourism destinations such as Chernobyl, Alcatraz and the Aokigahara Forest; and tourist traps designed to con, swindle or disappoint.
Bas has been long celebrated for narrative works permeated by humour, decadence, oddities, the occult and layered codes. He explores the intricacies of self-identity through figures poised at moments of transformation, where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary. In The Visitors, this sensibility turns outward. Like the dandies and flâneurs of Bas’s earlier works, these new figures hover at thresholds: between curiosity and arrogance, encounter and violation, experience and spectacle.
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Hernan Bas (b. Miami, Florida, 1978) lives and works in Miami, Florida. The artist’s recent solo institutional exhibitions include Hernan Bas: The Conceptualists, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA (2023); Hernan Bas: Choose Your Own Adventure, Space K, Seoul, South Korea; Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai, China (2021–22); Hernan Bas, Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2020–22); Hernan Bas: A Brief Intermission, CAC Málaga, Spain (2018) and Florida Living, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017). Bas’ work was featured as part of The Collectors, conceived by Elmgreen & Dragset for the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, The 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2009).
Works by the artist are included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
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Admission to the exhibition from May 7th to August 30th 2026, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.
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