Miami Beach, Florida.- The Bass Museum of Art is proud to present “Portrait of a Young Man: Laurent Grasso”, on view at the museum through February 12th 2012. French artist Laurent Grasso investigates shifting and multiple time frames in his conceptual art practice. His project at the Bass Museum of Art juxtaposes historical works from our permanent collection of Renaissance and Baroque art with his own series of paintings, sculptures, videos and neons. Here, Grasso provocatively forms literal and figurative connections between the past and the present. The exhibition takes as its departure point Laurent Grasso’s reflections on the rationality of the Renaissance, “the age of discovery,” a period in time when man began seeing the world in a completely different manner, becoming interested in individuality, the natural world, science, cosmology and the study of geography. A time when science and the arts were not disparate fields but rather informed one another. In the exhibition, Grasso’s fascination with history and science culminates in a recent series of paintings entitled Studies into the past.