Born in Portland, Oregon in 1961, Kris Haas is a self-taught visual artist whose practice is rooted in the language of abstraction. For Haas, abstraction is not a departure from reality but an entry point into deeper truths—where gesture, material, and texture communicate what words cannot. Guided by instinct and physical presence, her paintings emerge through layering, disruption, and reassembly, revealing the unstable yet profoundly human terrain of memory and perception.
Her series unfold as distinct yet interwoven explorations of abstraction’s possibilities. Disjointed Reality transforms collage painting into fractured, rhythmic architectures of form, echoing the challenge of coherence in a fractured world. Displaced Memories engages abstraction as a vessel for the mutable nature of recollection—layered surfaces that resist permanence while carrying emotional resonance. In Of & Being and Intervals of Being, abstraction becomes an act of becoming itself, with gestural fields and intuitive marks evoking states of consciousness, intimacy, and interior life. Tactile Commodity expands this vocabulary into material contradiction, where burlap, cloth, sand, and paint collide, heightening abstraction’s ability to hold both fragility and raw physicality.
Haas’s art is less about representation than about presence—the act of creating as excavation and revelation. Her works have been commissioned for high-profile spaces in Washington, D.C., featured in national television series, and collected in private and corporate settings. Through abstraction, she offers viewers not resolution but an invitation: to dwell within ambiguity, to witness rupture, and to discover beauty and resilience in the layered, unfinished surfaces of being.