Christoph HAASE

Christoph Haase is a German artist born in Paris in 1998. He practiced drawing from an early age. In 2015, he met the designer Olivier Mariotti who will be an important source of inspiration. He then pursued his practice by himself as a painter.
His paintings quickly met with great success and he received commissions for mural frescoes and theatre sets. He developed his aesthetic universe through the process of instinctive drawing. “I started to draw spontaneously, without ever reworking my drawings to preserve only intuition and raw lines.”
He graduated at SciencesPo and the Ecole du Louvre in History and History of Arts. These fields are an important source of inspiration, especially for his history paintings that tries to renew the atmosphere of mythological episodes as described in antic literature.
In the summer 2018 he practiced daily live model drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris. The same year, Christoph Haase exhibits at the Kultursalon in Frankfurt, and in 2019 he carries out his first artist's residency in Cassis, France.
Inspired by his knowledge in History of arts, Christoph Haase mixes a rich and varied iconography through an aesthetic universe recalling the neo-expressionist movement. Fascinated by Mesoamerican and Melanesian arts, he creates an oneiric world through highly expressive and symbolic compositions. In very moving canvases, he expresses certain nostalgia with spindly androgynous figures, often in slender positions, frozen in time and space.
In his “Séries corporelles”, he explores the possible representations of the human anatomy by creating abstract compositions based on representing different body postures. Superposing illustrative sets on complex backgrounds, he tries to find a balance between the figurative and the abstract.
Christoph Haase mainly works in Paris, where he develops his pictorial research through the study of live models, and in the South of France.

Artistic practice

Christoph Haase started to draw spontaneously, without ever reworking his drawings to preserve only intuition and raw lines. Bodies and particularly faces were the motifs that immediately fascinated him. “Faces features allow me to express many feelings and expressions. I like to neutralize a certain number of details of my characters: representing them in an androgynous way, without hair or distinctive signs that would allow to be gender-identified. This anonymization Makes them more of an archetype: it gives them an expression that could be universal. Once anonymized, I play with variation around the main set. Multiplying a motif by varying it slightly translates a vivid sensation of movement. This movement can have many meanings. More than a purely physical action, I tend to represent a psychic and expressive evolution. A multiplication or an imbrication of faces within each other can refer to ideas of identity but also to the movements of thought and the evolution of consciousness. Representing a face or a body in movement brings to my mind the question of temporality and the possibilities of evolution of thought in the present moment.”
In parallel of this fascination for the face and its expressions, Christoph Haase is also very interested in the human body and the aesthetic of its curves. He has been intensively practicing live model drawing. He chooses a universal and known reference frame – anatomy - to then enter in abstract research within the main motif. He tries to capture a movement, a curve, or a precise element of the body, an isolate it, incorporating it into a composition. Bringing these human curves into rich and colorful compositions connects his work to reality, while leaving free reign to his imagination deploying his personal aesthetic universe. “I am especially interested in quick drawing because it permits representing the live model by a single continuous line. In my atelier, I like to work from my sketches and integrate the motifs into larger, often abstract, compositions.”

Fascinated by many non-European arts, by the Huichol and Melanesian imagination, Christoph Haase is interested in the representation of dreams and the forms it takes. More than aesthetics, it is the symbolism of these works that impresses him. By combining many symbols, these cultures succeed in translating a dreamlike path into rich and complex assemblages. In large, lively compositions, the artist also tries to interweave a whole set of motifs from which the work can be read and interpreted. Masks are motifs that he likes ; they make it possible to support full and empty spaces. To give an attractive aesthetic to these sets, the choice of colors is essential: he likes when they give the impression of letting the light pass through, as church windows could do.