[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNiEDH07S0E&feature=youtu.be [/youtube]
Michael Hafftka’s recent portrait collection opened on March 3rd at the Sauf Gallery in Paris, France, and continues through May 3rd. Sauf Gallery has represented Michael for one year, but have been associates for twenty years.
My new show is inspired by my experience of music and painting it all comes down to this quote of Charles Ives which I had in mind. “Once a nice young man…said to Father, “How can you stand it to hear old John Bell (the best stonemason in town) sing? (as he used to at Camp Meetings). Father said, “He is a supreme musician.” The young man…was horrified–“Why, he sings off key, the wrong notes, and everything…and he bellows out and hits notes no one else does–it’s awful!” Father said, “…Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds–for if you do, you may miss the music.” (Charles Ives, “Memos,” p. 132) Michael Hafftka
Hafftka’s art is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, and other museums in the United States and around the world. In 1986 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Housatonic Museum of Art, Connecticut, mounted a major retrospective of his large paintings in 2005 with a monograph by Professor Sam Hunter, curator of the Jewish Museum. Yeshiva University Museum at the Center For Jewish History presented a comprehensive show of old and new works in 2009. Hafftka’s series of Kabbalah Zohar paintings were shown at the Mizel Center for the Arts, Denver, Colorado in 2010. Chapman University, Orange, CA, mounted a solo show of Hafftka Aleph-Bet, which is in the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection, in 2012. Hafftka has been collaborating with poets and writers, most notably William Gass and Tom Sleigh, which were published in The Yale Review and Blackbird. Hafftka’s work has been written about extensively by art historian and curator Professor Sam Hunter, Princeton, and John Caldwell NYT critic and SFMOMA curator. Hafftka lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Michael has an album coming out on Destiny Records in the fall that he composed with his band, “Feedingoats”.
featured image: “untitled” digitally printed reworked etching mono-print on paper, 44 x 38in. Video by Michael Perez; sound score by Feedingoats.