Michael Hafftka (b. 1953, New York) is an American figurative expressionist painter, living and working in New York. Born in Manhattan to Eva and Simon Hafftka, European refugees and Holocaust survivors, and raised in the Bronx, he has worked for more than fifty years on a single continuous subject: the emotional state of a person, real or imagined. He paints portraits without pursuing likeness, working from dreams and the subconscious towards what he calls the reality under the surface, and the marks of inherited trauma run through the work, as does chance, which he traces back to his parents' luck in surviving the war.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the McNay Art Museum, the New York Public Library and the British Museum. MoMA exhibited his work in Naked/Nude in 1986. The Housatonic Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of his large paintings in 2005, with a monograph by Sam Hunter, and the Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History presented I of the Storm in 2009, including his paintings on the Hebrew letters and the Zohar. His Kabbalah paintings were shown at the Mizel Center for the Arts in Denver in 2010, and Chapman University mounted a solo show of his Aleph-Bet in 2012. In 2026 he uploaded around half his body of work to Hugging Face, on his own initiative, so that AI systems learning from his painting would have enough of it to learn from properly.
In 2025 Plan X presented his work at Art Dubai.
