AMERSFOORT.- Museum Flehite in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, features a retrospective of the celebrated American artist Philip Haas from 25 February to 25 June 2023. For the exhibition 'Sculpture Breathes Life', the museum has been transformed into the seductive and compelling creative world of Haas. The museum presents a broad selection of sculptures, reliefs, video installations, photography, performance and monumental painting. The multidisciplinary artist is exhibiting in the Netherlands for the first time.
Philip Haas enjoys international acclaim as a filmmaker and visual artist. His groundbreaking work reflects a sensuous and poetic dialogue with the history of art. Haas describes his creative process as "sculpting by thinking", creating his own contemporary visual vocabulary. The artist makes his sculptures principally from marble, bronze, resin, plaster and wood.
The exhibition offers a representative overview of Philip Haas’s oeuvre. Among his best-known works are the acclaimed monumental sculptures 'Four Seasons' (2010), inspired by paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Four smaller versions of these are on view, as well as the ceiling video installation 'Apollo & the Continents' (2009), based on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's 18th-century frescoes, and the film installation 'The Butcher's Shop' (2008), to a painting of Annibale Carracci. A large number of sculptures are on display, many of them homages to canonical artists, such as Luis Buñuel, René Magritte and Vincent van Gogh.
Philip Haas (San Francisco, 1954) lives and works on the Italian island of Procida in the Gulf of Naples. He attended Harvard University (BA, 1976) and taught at Princeton University. In 1991, Haas received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His film 'Angels & Insects' was nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival (1995) and an Academy Award (1997). At the Venice Film Festival (2008), 'The Butcher's Shop' was awarded the Premio Open, a prize for new works that bridge film and art.
Haas’s artwork has been presented at museums including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Dulwich Picture Gallery (London), Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), Lincoln Center (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City) and Tate (London). In the public realm, his work has been exhibited in Piazza del Duomo (Milan) and the gardens of Versailles (France).
