Exhibition: Joshua Hagler at Unit London
“Chimera” Joshua Hagler
Until August 31st, 2019
@Unit London: https://theunitldn.com/portfolio/
Joshua Hagler’s large-scale oil paintings represent an excavation of time – layers of semi-realistic figures and historic scenes are distorted by marks, smears, cuts and puddles which render the images partially abstract, and allude to memory. “I want the paintings to have the feeling of vague recollection, a memory that starts to form but disappears,” Hagler says.
Our readers might remember that name from a review in our columns in 2016. There was his first solo show in Los Angeles at Jaus, curated by Ishiro Irie
At that time of 2016 he was working on the History of America through his memories from Western movies. Layers and complex composition started to appear.
Today Hagler explores a world in which strata of memories, personal or collective, get tangled in the form of superimposed layers. Some appear some others tend to disappear like anyone’s memory. As we can get lost in translation because of the complexity of the composition, the color palette and the mass taken by each color of paint ended to be predominant. Hagler’s palette is rich of browns, reds, greens, blues and yellows that give the tempo of reading to the retina.
Joshua Hagler was born in Mountain Town, Idaho in 1979 and spent his formative years living between rural llinois and Arizona. Hagler graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2002 and currently works and resides alongside his partner Maja Ruznic, a fellow contemporary painter, in Los Angeles, California. Since 2006, Hagler has exhibited at both group and solo shows in galleries and museums across North and South America, Europe, and Australia. In the summer of 2017, he was awarded a place on MICA’s Alfred and Trafford Klots Program for Artists in Brittany, France and undertook a year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico. His project proposal for a large-scale installation and exhibition was chosen by the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles was debuted in the summer of 2018.
