May 6 – 30, 2026  ·  Collective Z, New York

We are pleased to announce Nuclear Eden, the first solo exhibition of painter and filmmaker Harrison Haft — on view beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, May 6, at Collective Z, 325 Broome Street.

The title is both warning and invitation. In the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe, the garden does not die. It mutates, proliferates, becomes strange with a vitality that was always present and is now beyond control. Haft's paintings envision this irradiated paradise — an after-state in which inherited beliefs collapse and recombine rather than vanish.

Built from rigorously staged and manipulated photographic references, the paintings translate contemporary, psychologically charged imagery into oil through the formal language of the old masters — Flemish glaze, Baroque torsion, the compositional weight of bodies arranged against darkness. The anachronism is corrective rather than nostalgic: Haft inserts corrupted figures into vocabularies from which they have been historically erased, asserting presence rather than arguing for it.

Across the canvases, figures are hybrid — part human, part animal, part mythological. A peacock's tail becomes a field of unblinking eyes. A nine-tailed fox stands haloed by candle flame. A white fawn rests among heavy blooms, its softness already implicated in the rotting sweetness around it. In the exhibition's most physically constructed work, the painted surface has been pulled apart — the skin shattered into hundreds of taped fragments, the figure beneath visible only through the cracks, as though the image were trying to remember itself out of the wreckage.

The exhibition enters into dialogue with the corporeal intensity of Francis Bacon, the erotic and philosophical transgression of Georges Bataille, and the ecological delirium embedded in the work of Hieronymus Bosch. The conversation Haft enters is explicitly art-historical — and what survives the pressure is not knowledge but experience.