Luis Gispert Haptic Fantastic

Born in New Jersey, raised in Miami, and based in Brooklyn, Gispert has spent the last 25 years examining how subcultures influence mainstream aesthetics without losing their core pulse. His work captures the tension between cultural absorption and resistance—how fringe styles become popular, yet still hold onto their original charge.

This new body of work includes five small and medium-scale abstract paintings and three sculptures made from plywood forms. In the paintings, Gispert creates layered, circular compositions that feel both improvised and precise. These dense, almost glyph-like marks form visual rhythms—like diagrams for sound or coded messages from another place. His hand-driven process lends the works an electric energy, as if each form emerged from a trance-like state that Gispert describes as the “haptic-fantastic.”

The sculptural components of the exhibition are comprised of plywood modular “husks” subtly referencing canonical speakers. Imposing and hollow, the sculptures feel like altars to obsolete technology—objects that once spoke loudly and now resonate silently. Stripped of sound, they suggests how cultural artifacts can fade from utility but remain charged with memory.

Together, the works evoke shifting geographies—urban maps, futuristic ruins, or alien settlements in tropical landscapes. Haptic Fantastic plays with distance and dislocation, inviting viewers into imagined spaces where past, present, and possible futures all collide.

Luis Gispert (b. 1972) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his MFA from Yale University. Gispert has exhibited widely, including solo institutional exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art UC Berkeley University Art Gallery; University of California, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Art Pace San Antonio, TX; and Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. His work is in the permanent collection of twenty-eight prominent institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Museum of Fine Art Boston, Boston, MA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Harvard Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Museo Del Bario, New York, NY; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH; and Haifa Museum of Art, Israel amongst others.