Michael Haffka, whose highly praised paintings are on display and owned by the MOMA, The Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and more, is having his first gallery show in Brooklyn ever, at known “avant garde” gallery, Vaudeville Park (www.vaudevillepark.org), sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts. Wraithworld features 10 recent paintings that comprised of the full repertoire of allegorical themes and characters that Hafftka developed during an over 3 decade long career, exploring the deepest impulses and expression of his established style.

Hafftka’s canvases consist of solitary, duos, and trios of human figures (often portraits of close friends and family) set against stark backgrounds. These people often engage and intimidate each other while struggling with internal, spiritual activities, and sometimes are manifested as shadowy specters. Formally aberrant with spontaneous and heavy gestural marks, the paintings are sublime manifestations of his subject’s animus.

Like the other great masters of myth and allegory, Francis Bacon and Goya, Hafftka is keenly aware and familiarized with strife, death, and misfortune. His parents were holocaust survivors, and Hafftka himself lived through the Yom Kippur War, and witnessing the attack on the World Trade Center. These seminal events informed the chaotic, post-millennial world we live in today, to which many artists and citizens alike have become cynical and jaded towards. Hafftka’s unflinchingly sincere and steadfastly existential representation of morality, politics, and philosophy in contemporary society is a surprisingly refreshing and humanizing view of society.