Shaun Haugen
Shaun Haugen (b. 1986, Austin, TX) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice explores perception, abstraction, and the phenomenology of visual experience. Working primarily with painting and drawing, Haugen investigates the optical and psychological effects of color, pattern, and geometric structure.
He earned his BFA in Studio Art with a minor in English Writing from Texas State University in 2019, graduating summa cum laude. In 2023, he completed his MFA at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, graduating with distinction. Haugen has participated in notable residencies, including the School of the Alternative in Black Mountain, North Carolina, a program inspired by the experimental legacy of Black Mountain College. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City, London, Cologne, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, Oklahoma, and throughout Texas. He has presented solo exhibitions in Manhattan, NY, and Austin, TX. Through an interdisciplinary and research-driven approach, Haugen’s work continues to expand the language of abstraction while engaging deeply with perception, sensation, and embodied experience.
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Solo Exhibition — Afterimages of the Invisible
By Sfumato
In Afterimages of the Invisible, Shaun Haugen invites viewers into a world shaped by fleeting perception and internal vision. The exhibition unfolds as an intimate exploration of visual hallucinations—brief, holographic-like flashes of color that the artist experiences and translates into carefully constructed abstract compositions. These works do not attempt to document vision as it is seen, but rather as it is felt—ephemeral, vibrating, and constantly in motion. Haugen’s paintings and drawings are built from precise geometric structures: zigzags, radiating lines, and rhythmic patterns that pulse across the surface. Executed with acrylic and ink pens on paper and chipboard, the works evoke optical phenomena associated with Op Art and Minimalism, while resisting their historical detachment. Instead, Haugen’s abstractions remain deeply personal, grounded in lived sensory experience.
Works such as The News Today and Two Rooms, One Dream create dense visual fields that oscillate between flatness and depth. Color functions not only as a compositional element, but as an active force—vibrating, refracting, and destabilizing the viewer’s sense of space. The eye is drawn into a constant negotiation between structure and illusion, stillness and movement.
Notably, Haugen chooses to work at a compact scale. This intentional restraint transforms the viewing experience into something quiet and contemplative. Rather than overwhelming the viewer, the works reward close attention, encouraging prolonged looking and a meditative engagement. The intimacy of scale mirrors the private nature of the artist’s source material, collapsing the distance between inner perception and external form.
Afterimages of the Invisible positions abstraction as a bridge between neuroscience, phenomenology, and visual poetry. Haugen’s work reminds us that perception is never fixed—it flickers, shifts, and leaves traces behind. What remains is not an image, but an afterimage: a lingering sensation that exists somewhere between the eye, the mind, and the body.
