Gregory de la Haba at Milan’s Design Week

Gregory de la Haba is an eclectic New York artist, who began painting during his early days at Harvard University, the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston and Universidad Sacrado Corazon in Puerto Rico. In the course of his artistic path, the virtuoso man has joined the Mail Art group, and partnered with the prestigious contemporary art magazine Whitehot Magazine. Gregory is also the curator of Bodega de la Haba, that organizes cultural events and art shows in and out of the United States.

As an artist de la Haba is well-known for his totem-sque surfboards that he carves himself, and that have been presented at the Surfer Healing Foundation, next to the works of Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel and Ron English. In Europe Gregory is represented by Amstel Gallery in Amsterdam. Currently his surfboards showcased for the first time in Milan, during the vibrant Design Week, at The Black Sheep Gallery.

The multimedia installation “It’s Only The Beginning” (12-19 April) introduces Gregory de la Haba to the Italian audience, with three of his sculptural surfboards;along with videos, that the artist created in the Hamptons, the well known summer destination for the New York one percent.

The handmade Stellar Surf Totem Surfboards first came to life in 2015, as Gregory’s poetic expression of our world. The Sun and Pluto, untamed horses, a couple of lovers caught in their outburst of passion, are the tales represented as the epitome of the moment of creation.

Through his video installations, de la Haba embarks on an extraordinary visual voyage that leads spectators back to myths that transcend time and space. Women with undefined features, tracks covered in frost, sand dunes, all come together to depict a surrealistic scenery where a mysterious clan carries out its ritual. Man embodies the power, beauty and sensibility of Mother Nature, solely guided by instinct. This is artist’s intuition that so strongly resonates in his mixed media work.

All of Gregory’s works convey to a more profound understanding of ourselves and reconnection with the world around us, also through the free expression of sexual impulses. Man is the main actor of a phenomenological trip, where experience follows universal rules.

The gender dialectics portray the male as the active part of creation. This is de la Haba’s leitmotiv in his creations and the trait d’union that ties his diverse artistic expression, that finds inspiration in Neoclassical art and is pushed to its limits, to tribute today’s Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

“It’s Only The Beginning” showcased at The Black Sheep Space in Milan, that was born from a culturally independent project, to explore new paradigms of today’s art and give a platform to international artists. The gallery is specialized in American art, even in it’s Milanese branch, and organizes traveling exhibits to reach a vast number of audiences.

Experimental artists find their proper home in the itinerant Black Sheep, as it amalgamates creative minds from all over the world, to bring to life new forms of participation and cultural contaminations. This is the third millennium concept of

The Factory, where the world is the artist’s oyster and the digital era has shrunk the size of the global village, allowing each art lover to avail the diverse creative disciplines.

Gregory de la Haba’s art truly charmed the Design Week in Milan, an influential appointment on the European calendar that is by now an established recruiter of the most promising talents in the contemporary artistic arena.