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Eric Haze

New York, NY

Born and bred in New York City, Eric Haze has contributed to the worlds of graffiti, contemporary art, and graphic design for over four decades. HAZE’s formative years were spent as a founding member of the influential New York City graffiti collective The Soul Artists, with whom he first exhibited work in 1974. HAZE went on to exhibit paintings and drawings alongside close friends such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s.

 

HAZE has since made a career out of pushing creative boundaries in a wide variety of mediums. After shifting his focus from galleries to the applied arts in the mid ’80s, HAZE soon emerged as the premier graphic designer of the exploding hip-hop movement, creating iconic logos and album covers for some of the most influential and historic names in the genre.

 

 “Symphony of Kings,” a painting that celebrates the act of painting, shows a departure from HAZE’s previous work, delving deeper into abstraction, balancing symbols and iconography in the exploration of a language that is both uniquely personal yet universal. The consecutive panels, designed to be installed directly on top of a larger, site-specific mural, allow this installation to marry the scale and immersive impact of public art with the more controlled intention of private studio work, reinforcing the relationship and tension between what is currently considered “street art” against a more personalized, future-forward notion of “contemporary art.”

 

The new millennium has also seen HAZE recommit himself to painting and drawing again, with solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris. His current work lends itself to an array of important movements in art history, at times revealing elements of constructivism, geometric abstraction, and conceptualism, balancing unique icons, abstract shapes, and intersecting lines to achieve a language that is universal yet deeply personal at the same time.

 

HAZE currently works out of Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, actor Rosie Perez.

 

BEYOND THE STREETS Los Angeles, 2018. Photo by Beau Roulette.