Four Seasons
Philip Haas brings his work to Pinecrest Gardens
Internationally-renowned contemporary artist and filmmaker Philip Haas will display his acclaimed FOUR SEASONS installation November 16th to April 6, 2015 in Pinecrest Gardens’ lush botanical sanctuary.
Consisting of four 15-foot-tall busts, Haas’s FOUR SEASONS bring 16th-century Renaissance portraiture by Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo into modern times through a transformation of scale, material and dimensionality.
While Arcimboldo’s paintings present each subject in profile, Haas’s unconventional twist on the classical form allows visitors the opportunity to walk around the sculptures, to see the subjects from all sides, and from many different and surprising vantage points.
Each work represents an individual season and is distinctly unusual and extravagant. AUTUMN is comprised of fall vegetables, ripe grapes and leaves turning color. Weathered bark and verdant moss make up WINTER’s stoic bust, which sits on top of a cloak of straw. SPRING evokes rebirth and vibrancy with a face consisting of rose-colored petals and hair brimming with elaborate flowers. SUMMER’s hue is a variety of sun-kissed yellows; its face and headdress sprout onions, garlic, corn, peas, a multiplicity of fruit, and a cucumber nose. The sculptures are made of pigmented and painted fiberglass, supported by interior steel frames.
“I started the FOUR SEASONS project wanting to bring Arcimboldo’s Renaissance painted nature imagery into the 21st-century physical world. I can’t think of a better venue than Pinecrest Gardens to inaugurate the Florida tour of this work, where the sculptures will arrive in the one of the oldest outposts of the New World, having fled their earlier homes as paintings in European museums, to now rest, and blend in, for an extended period amid the lush tropical flora, rock formations and historic water features,” said Haas.
In marrying sculpture, painting, film, and architecture, Philip Haas has created a contemporary visual vocabulary all his own. He describes his process as “sculpting by thinking”. His groundbreaking artwork has been featured by museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), Dulwich Picture Gallery (United Kingdom), and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). In the public realm, his work has been exhibited in the Piazza del Duomo (Milan) and the Gardens of Versailles (France). His feature films include ANGELS & INSECTS, THE MUSIC OF CHANCE and UP AT THE VILLA. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as other awards. He has taught in the visual arts and creative writing programs at Princeton University. He lives and works in New York and London.
FOUR SEASONS by Philip Haas is the latest commission of Pinecrest Garden’s art program.
