Sebastian Haas

Lives and works in Bern, Switzerland

Artist statement

Sebastian Haas (*1992, works and lives in Bern) His work ‘total’ is a series of paintings behind glass - i.e. paintings on the reverse side of glass panes. The artist uses oil and spray paint to create images of reduced colour and is deliberately légère in his work method. Here, the glass surface flattens the different layers of paint, and the paintings attract me with their reflecting surface. At first glance, the compositions seem abstract, but on closer inspection I begin to see architectural elements, figurative forms or seemingly organic shapes in the black, gray and white areas. Sebastian Haas is interested in the ambivalence between abstraction and figuration. He experiments with a reduced mode of representation in which the observer, in an element of surprise, recognizes concrete things. The artist is interested in stage-like settings, perceived through the visible horizon created in the paintings. He cites Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian painter and precursor of Surrealism, as an important reference, who created perspectival urban landscapes with his metaphysical painting, in which ancient columns, fragments of statues or absurd objects such as bananas or gloves form dreamy, theatrical spaces. Sebastian Haas‘ paintings seem like a contemporary, somewhat dystopian update of de Chirico‘s spaces. Their gleaming surfaces remind me of the reflective screen of my iPhone – that technical device that, today, increasingly mediates between myself and the world, and...

Artwork

• Reminisce-Supports –series, 2026. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass, framed plexiglas, aluminium, wood
• Reminisce-Supports –series, 2026. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass, framed plexiglas, aluminium, wood
• Reminisce-Supports –series, 2026. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass, framed plexiglas, aluminium, wood
• Untitled –series, 2024. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass
• On the terrace, you have the winter in your pocket, 2023. Oil, spraypaint, reverse glass, framed
• the forming third –series, 2024. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass
• In my mind, I would like to be further –series, 2023. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass, framed
• the forming third –series, 2023. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass
• Untitled –series, 2019. 3-D-Print
• Untitled –series, 2021. Oil, sprayapint reverse curved glass
• Untitled –series, 2020. 3-D-Print and oil, spraypaint reverse glass, framed
• 2020. Oil, spraypaint reverse curved glass, artist frame