JM Haessle

Mizuma Kips & Wada Art is pleased to announce the opening of Gnossienne, a solo exhibition of paintings by artist JM Haessle.

Jean-Marie Haessle has been working in New York since 1967, and quickly emerged as a distinctive voice amid the cerebral formalism of the Modernists. Haessle’s appreciation for Color Field composition melded his romantic hand with an expository rigor, a combination that quickly set him apart from his contemporaries. Never a slave to style, Haessle has explored the communicative possibilities of gesture in many iterations over the course of his career, and his ‘70’s geometric abstractions are no exception. Throughout the evolution of his practice, Haessle’s investment in constructing edgeless immersions through mark-making has remained steadfast; his interventions, whether patterned or free-form, achieve harmony in agglomeration, creating thresholds through chromatically anchored deployments of instinct. In turns meditative and defiant, Haessle’s iconic works are love letters to process itself.

Haessle was born in 1939 in Alsace, France. During an adolescent bout of illness, he discovered a book of paintings by Van Gogh, and resolved to become an artist. Following a stint in the military, he spent some time in Paris before moving to New York City, where he is still based today. Haessle has shown in high-profile venues all over the world, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Korea University Art Museum in Seoul, Korea, The Taiwan Museum in Taipei, Gallery One in Tokyo, Japan, the Bussan Museum of Art in Korea, Galerie Jade in Colmar, France, and Kips Gallery in New York City. His work has been profiled by critics Jonathan Goodman, Robert C. Morgan, David Shapiro and Bernard Zurcher (French art historian/critic).