Agita — Joseph Yaeger

Gladstone is pleased to present Agita, the gallery’s first exhibition with artist Joseph Yaeger. Known for his distinctive watercolor-on-gesso paintings that depict a series of interconnected and psychically charged subjects, Yaeger’s work probes our propensity to read shared cultural imagery through the lens of private desire. As is typical of the artist’s practice, Agita is accompanied by a new publication of the same title. Drafted as the structural precursor to the exhibition, this confessional and sometimes unreliable text emphasize Yaeger’s interest in falsehoods, misidentifications, and the gains and losses that populate the distance between encounter and recollection.

While Yaeger’s paintings find their spiritual genesis in his writing practice, their imagery is driven by the artist’s interest in memory, sense, and the episodes of involuntary retrieval that synthesize them. Each painting takes its initial inspiration from a cinematic or purely photographic source that the artist then crops, disrupts, and otherwise manipulates, but if the images that develop across Yaeger’s canvases are ultimately estranged from their native origins, they exude a latent familiarity. The viewer is confronted with a self-generating cascade of connotations, our conscious minds fixated on identifying from which narrative each subject has been abducted as we dredge our memories for past impressions. The effect of this search is akin to a kind of psychological lethologica: we might know the word, but we cannot quite manage to find it.

Displaced from their chronologies, Yaeger’s partial narratives exert the strange pull of déjà vu; here, the uncanny illusion that we are re-encountering the almost-familiar thing reminds us that we often somatically process experience before language can play its mischievous obfuscations. If the simultaneous feelings of dread and fascination stirred by the subjects of these paintings emerge from the collapsing sense of time they convey, Yaeger’s surfaces emphatically suggest the now. Charging cables, eyeglasses, paintbrushes and coins push out from these images in relief, mottling each confused timeline with the casually meaningless debris of the extreme present.

About Joseph Yaeger

Joseph Yaeger (b. 1986, Helena, Montana) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and his MFA in painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2019). The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Perimeter, London (2023); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2022); Project Native Informant, London (2021); and V.O. Curations, London (2020), in addition to group shows at Modern Art, London (2024); Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, United Kingdom (2024); Lisson Gallery, London (2024); k11, Shanghai (2023); Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); David Lewis, New York (2022); and The Perimeter, London (2022). Yaeger's work is held in the collection of the Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway.