JOSEPH YAEGER: AGITA

Be that as it may, 2025

Gladstone is pleased to present Agita, the gallery’s first exhibition with artist Joseph Yaeger in New York.

September 16 - October 31, 2026

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.

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.

Only one undeneath, 2025

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.

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.