Æmen Ededéen will now be represented by Maruani Mercier Gallery, which can host the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in January 2026. The upcoming solo present will function work from the artist’s ongoing mixed-media portray collection “The Glass Dream Sport.” A few of these works had been lately proven by the Belgian gallery at Artwork Brussels in April.
The artist, who started his profession making political artwork, has since began making extra symbolic, intuitive work. His course of consists of rituals that have interaction with patterns he senses on the earth, leading to vivid, layered canvases, wealthy with allusion. “Prior to now, I made political work to confront the tradition,” he mentioned in an interview with ArtPlugged. “Now, I see it was additionally a strategy to keep away from confronting myself.”
Born on an Air Pressure base in Mountain Dwelling, Idaho, Ededéen—previously generally known as Joshua Hagler—was raised in rural evangelical communities in Illinois, Arizona, and California. He’s a first-generation faculty graduate who obtained a BFA from the College of Arizona.
Following a 2018 grant from the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Ededéen relocated to New Mexico, the place he now lives together with his spouse and daughter within the excessive desert village of Placitas.
In “The Glass Dream Sport,” Ededéen begins every portray by utilizing a random quantity generator to pick six books from his library, then opens every to a single web page to create what he calls a “Hexagram.” He research the content material of these pages—textual content, pictures, and even blanks—to establish patterns, symbols, or coincidences, which he reorganizes right into a narrative construction he calls the “Trial,” adopted by a written “Dream” and a remaining visible “Imaginative and prescient.” The ensuing portray emerges by means of layered mixed-media methods, together with scraping and embedding glass beads.
Museum exhibitions embody “The River Lethe” on the Model Library and Artwork Heart in Los Angeles and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” on the Roswell Museum and Artwork Heart, each in 2018. Extra lately, he offered solo exhibitions “Drawing within the Darkish” at Cris Worley Advantageous Arts in Dallas and “The Residing Circle Us” at London’s Unit in 2021. A brand new monograph, titled Nihil: Joshua Hagler in New Mexico, written by John Yau, can be printed on twenty fourth July.
