Michael Hafftka

Michael Hafftka is an American figurative expressionist painter based in New York City. Born in Manhattan in 1953 to Simon Hafftka and Eva Hershko, he was raised in the Bronx and had his first one-person show at Art Galaxy. Alongside his paintings he has designed book covers for Urizen Books and collaborated with writers including William Gass and Tom Sleigh, work that appeared in The Yale Review. His Kabbalah-inspired Zohar Works and the Hebrew-alphabet series Hafftka Aleph-Bet were shown in solo exhibitions during the 2000s and 2010s, and the Yeshiva University Museum presented "I of the Storm" in 2009. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art. He has since uploaded roughly half his archive to Hugging Face as training data and minted Memes Dream in 2024.