Ašot Haas - Insight
from 20. 10. 2023 to 4. 2. 2024
The Slovak National Museum presents the exhibition entitled Insight, a selection of multimedia visual artist Ašot Haas’s current works which were inspired by his residency at the Slovak Institute in Jerusalem last year. Affected by the richness, spirituality, and combination of various religious beliefs of people from that holy city, Haas created imaginative works building on his constantly evolving program. He stimulates personal experience and the creation of own narratives by casual imagination.
The exhibition project is conceived as dark, intimate, and intense scenery, from inside of which a new artistic series emerges. The figural composition which is an appropriation of Michelangelo´s David will be premiered here. Hass dynamizes the sculpture and rotates it 360 degrees thus creating a distinctive formal deformation and symbol of the tireless endeavor to achieve the unachievable.
The new cycle of six pieces of diamonds referring to the wealth and business of Israel, is also featured. The artist immersed himself in the history of the formation of diamonds and was inspired by the most perfect version of diamond cutting, which was created by Belgian designer and technician Marcel Tolkowsky (1899-1991). By scanning Tolkowsky´s diamonds, Haas created his own versions, which he transformed into optical glass forged by vacuum technology. The exhibition also includes luminous objects – linear circular motifs representing the premises of unknown sacral domes and vibrating abstract relief drawings made of plexiglass that pull us into a spiritual world not associated with any specific belief.
Haas’s creations are is based on the foundations of technological and material experiment resulting in significant abstract motifs that work with the repetitions and variations of basic geometric shapes. Although he fully relies on the history of art, echoes of Op-art and geometric abstraction, and Minimalism, digitization and his knowledge of industrial production, as well as technological and material innovations in combination with physical and mathematical laws, create functional connections which are unique in our environment.
The artist’s objects, paintings, relief paintings, and luminous installation require one to slow down internally and to focus on the small details. Through gradual changes of shades and the thickness of lines, or small shifts and spacing between geometric shapes, dehumanized artifacts acquire an organic character thanks to tiny changes and expressive “imperfections”, which is in natural contrast to the technological aspect of their formation. In reality, the imaginary principle of visual coincidence is the outcome of hours of coding, creating copyright software, collecting and evaluating data.
Ašot Haas (1981, Moscow) lives and works in Bratislava. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where from 2002 to 2007 he passed through the studios of Industrial Design (Ferdinand Chrenka), Transport Design (Štefan Klein), Glass (Juraj Gavula), and Sculpture, Object, and Installation (Juraj Meliš). In 2019 he won the ILDA Award and in 2007 the NOVA Gallery Award for Glass. He has had solo exhibitions in such institutions as Incheba Expo Arena in Bratislava (2011), Bellart Gallery in Vienna (2020), Kunsthalle Košice (2019), DSC Gallery in Prague (2016), Nedbalka in Bratislava (2013), PGU in Žilina (2012) and others. Works of Ašot Haas’s works can be found in many private and state collections. See https://asothaas.com/ for more information about him.
