Hernan Bas: Memphis Living, Victoria Miro & Victoria Miro Mayfair

Acclaimed Detroit-based painter Hernan Bas, daringly takes inspiration from the short-lived, 1980’s Memphis Group in Memphis Living, showing at both Victoria Miro Gallery sites. Bas, a lover of the decorative arts and interior design, presents his inspiration through a collection of never-yet-seen paintings, constructing a sculptural design-quality on the canvas. 

The Memphis Group has often received a divided response, especially when they first formed. Opinion split amongst critics as to whether the group was brilliantly ‘kitsch’, or just ‘bad taste.’ Will Bas convince us there is more to the Memphis style? He declares that the movement emerged out of an “impassioned moment” that deserves retrospective appreciation. We are certainly willing to give him a chance.

The Italian designer Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis Group in Milan in 1981. The group was named after the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again that played on repeat during their first meeting. This small family of designers rejected the 1970s, slick minimalist designs that were ‘lacking personality’ and dominating all interior design. It was a reactionary aesthetic movement that brought back an explosion of energy, flamboyance, asymmetry and colour. It was the reintegration of 1960’s Pop Art into real life. A willing Americanization of European design.

For these radical Italian designers, the Memphis Group was a way of being. Unconcerned with creating ‘tasteful’ products, the superficial appearance was intentional; “the notion of the false being more authentic than the actuality.” The aim was to create visual irony - a sense of humour as the most potent stylistic weapon. Terence Conran, a friend of Sottsass, described it as "rather like the emperor's new clothes” and not to be taken seriously. Perhaps those who simply critiqued it for being ‘tacky’ weren’t quite getting the point.

Karl Lagerfield, the Creative Director of Chanel and known collector of Memphis design, declares “it was love at first sight…now it seems very 1980s, but the mood will come back.” Unsurprisingly, Lagerfield’s prophecy was true. In 2011, the Memphis style was the inspiration for Christian Dior’s Fall/Winter collection.

Bas, who has steadily risen to prominence as a painter in recent years, genuinely offers art that is pleasing to the eye, his work practically oozes with the painterly. Characteristically, his painting “indulges in the production of romantic, melancholic and old world imagery.” He has a romanticized view of the past.

Why is Bas so fascinated with the Memphis style? For him, it was “firmly rooted in his pre-teenage subconsciousness.” The exhibition is a nostalgic return for him, bringing up memories of his childhood watching Tim Burton’s comedy-fantasy Beetlejuice. The Memphis Group was an aesthetic escapism from the clinical designs of the day – possibly a parallel to Bas’ own artistic career as he tries to revive the medium of painting within postmodernism. Bas shifts the emphasis back onto the artists ‘pure’ imagination.

The exhibitions at the Victoria Miro Gallery and Victoria Miro Mayfair will also coincide with the recent Rizzoli publication of Hernan’s Bas career to date, a “lavish monograph”, featuring 200 coloured-images of Bas’ works.