Anatomy is a platform that dissects and narrows in on the various parts of an artist’s practice through the lens of their studio. This presentation provides a glimpse into an artist’s background and process through a multimedia tour including video, audio clips, imagery, and conversations with fellow artists, curators, and other figures who have been influential in shaping and understanding these creators and their works. Anatomy's intent is to examine the myriad of ways in which an artist finds inspiration, merges art and life, and is driven by experience and the people that come into their world. We hope that this look into the lifeblood of the artist’s practice will affect an even deeper reading of the works included and those yet to come. 

Born and bred in New York City, Haze has been influential in the worlds of graffiti, graphic design and contemporary art for over four decades. After making his initial mark as a pioneer of graffiti’s rise above ground in the 1970s and 80s, Haze made a career out of pushing creative boundaries in a number of mediums, soon emerging as the premier graphic designer of the exploding Hip Hop movement. Throughout the next decade, Haze created iconic logos, album covers and identities for the likes of The Beastie Boys, Tommy Boy, LL Cool J, EPMD, MTV, and many others. The new millennium has seen Haze make a serious commitment and return to painting and drawing. Working out of his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Haze’s personal work reflects an array of important movements in art history. Anatomy: Eric Haze presents 12 works that deal with abstract shapes and intersecting lines, reflecting universal themes and his passion for movement and gesture. 

 Haze’s interest in art began at an early age, when he and his younger sister were sitters for a 1971 portrait by Elaine De Kooning at just 10 years old. The painting was made in several afternoon sessions at De Kooning’s apartment near Union Square, fostering an experience that introduced to Haze the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists from which his practice today draws significant influence. Allowing instincts and emotions to guide his creative decisions, Haze follows in the footsteps of the movement’s leaders in these artists’ attempts to convey their inner experiences through their work, using painting as a means to reveal the subconscious and universal human condition. Color was viewed as one of the most powerful tools of communication, not merely used to depict objects in the world, but as a primary means of expression in its own right. To this end, Haze’s captivation with a black, white and gray color palette references Jackson Pollock’s black pourings—which resemble graphic design while embodying the synthesized essence of his renowned drip paintings—and Robert Motherwelll’s ‘Elegy to the Spanish Republic’ series, comprised of over 200 pieces in memoriam of the lives lost in Spanish Civil War, through which the late artist “discovered black as one of [his] subjects.”

Haze's venture into portraiture reflects the fearlessness of his modern predecessors, and in a natural transition, begins through the study of his environment. In a personal reflection, Haze voices that “nothing is more a part of who [he is] and [his] experience [than New York City].” Haze’s teenage years were spent as a founding member of the influential graffiti collective The Soul Artists, with whom he first exhibited in 1974. He then went on to exhibit paintings and drawings alongside close friends such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the early 1980s; upon opening his SoHo Pop Shop in 1986, it was Haring who first encouraged Haze to create product. Observing first-hand Haring’s success in radically bridging the gap between the art world and the streets, Haze cites the celebrated artist as a steadfast muse. Haze’s creations today are very much rooted in these formative relationships and experiences, for example his urban landscapes, which draw their initial source from a combination of memory and existing imagery. In this regard, Haze derives inspiration from the photographs of prolific New York street photographer Matt Weber, a longtime friend who served as a mentor to Haze throughout his emergence as a graffiti artist, oftentimes documenting him in action. The works take shape through Haze’s impressions of the city and its evolution over the decades—he does not focus on its landmarks, but on the unassuming street corners and gritty alleyways in which he finds endless hidden beauty. Much like Edward Hopper’s exacting portraits of the twentieth-century metropolis, Haze’s scenes are often devoid of distinctive figures, emphasizing the anonymity and introspection found in a bustling urban center.

“One of the most important things to me about painting is to feel a personal connection and passion for the subject, whether it's a landscape or a person. And one of the things that was so obvious to me at the beginning of this arc, of this work, was that nothing captured my imagination more than New York City.”

Haze’s ‘Night Moves’ series possesses a cinematic quality, the artist citing documentaries, b-roll footage and, specifically, film noir—a classic film genre that rose in popularity in the 1950s as anxieties of the postwar era provided fertile ground for exploring darker and more introspective themes amid civilians—to be key sources of inspiration in both the paintings’ aesthetic and thematic elements. Created in 2019, Belmore Cafe and Night Runner are amongst the first urban landscapes Haze ever produced, and his formal approach to the canvas, mainly his use of black and attention to greater expanses of space, evokes a ghostly aura. The reductionist works nostalgically capture a bygone era of New York, presenting the city not as it is today, but as Haze remembers it; boxy cars and vintage signage serve as pronounced time markers, uniquely transporting viewers to a preserved period in time. Night Runner is a rare constituent in the ‘Night Moves’ series in that its composition centralizes a distinguishable figure, however, the figure’s solitariness aids in emphasizing the intended sense of atmospheric vacancy. 

Created in 2023, Electric City illustrates the evolution in Haze’s painterly craft. As he becomes increasingly acquainted with his material, the landscapes inherently grow to become much more complex. Tones of color are expanded and forms become less discernible, and in turn, once eerie scenes have transformed into lively cityscapes emanating with action. Haze’s skilled method of documenting his environment goes beyond the mere portrayal of its true physical qualities. Rather, he places a primary focus on channeling the subjective energy that animates his surroundings to capture the atmosphere’s vital essence. By distancing himself from a realist approach to his source, Haze succeeds in pushing recognizable urban features, such as bright lights, puddles and crowds of pedestrians, into a blur of abstraction. 

An integral element of both graffiti and graphic design, accessibility has long been a fundamental driver of Haze’s creative pursuits. Upon shifting his focus to the ever-exclusive world of fine art in recent years, he found the territory to uphold this core value in his chosen subjects and their deliberate presentations. Exemplified in Street Dreams, Haze’s stylistic approach to his paintings works as an agent in affecting nostalgia, memory and reflection. He distills scenes down to their most basic visual indicators to allude to a dreamlike state. Imaginative, fragmented and oftentimes nonsensical, these qualities of the dreamplace are reflected in the soft edges of his forms, or the occasional sighting of an unfinished brushstroke. In working to capture fleeting sentiments of his own recollection, Haze creates a greater space for the viewer to draw their own associations to the scene, fostering a collective consciousness that transcends the painting’s pointed origin.