Unmatter

Joshua Hagler (1979, Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, United States) lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico, where he moved in 2018 as a grant recipient of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. He graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with a degree in visual communications. Self-directed research and travel inspire the artist career determining how he integrates creative influences with life experience. He explores subjects including his middle American upbringing, the 19th-century exploration of North America, modern science fiction, and the traditions of Italian religious art.  Hagler confronts ideas of extreme religious experience and notions of wider cultural and social identities. He conceives large-format canvases with scenes often distorted by gestural smears of fluid brushwork that enter into realms of abstraction. His paintings, sculptures, videos, and animations have been exhibited internationally: “The Living Circle Us”, curated by David Anfam, Unit London, London, 2021; “Drawing in the Dark”, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas, 2021; “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, 2018; “The River Lethe”, Brand Library & Art Center, Los Angeles, 2018, “With Liberty and Justice for Some”, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, 2018; “Dreams and Fevers”, Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2018, among others. In 2021, he released his first monograph entitled “This is the Picture”. Furthermore, he is also an author of poems and essays.

Maja Ruznic (1983, Bosnia and Herzegovina) immigrated to the United States with her family in 1995, settling on the West Coast. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and received an MFA from the California College of Arts. Ruznic’s often-quoted biography – a refugee who escaped the Bosnian War – is only the beginning of her journey.

A prolific and active artist, she is primarily a painter, a storyteller who conjures form and narrative from ground up mineral, smeared oil, and stained canvas. Ruznic’s vivid paintings speak for themselves, depicting figures that seem to emerge from the caverns of human history, from within their own supports, and somehow from within the viewer’s own recollections. These paintings breach something intrinsically human and Ruznic guides us deftly with dark humor and complex representations, not dissimilar to Werner Herzog’s wry, but poignant 3-D documentary depicting the oldest painted images in the world.

Among her exhibitions: “Hi Woman! La notizia del futuro”, curated by Francesco Bonami, Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, 2021; “In the Sliver of the Sun: Maja Ruznic”, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, 2021; “Parallax: A RAiR Connection Exhibition”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, 2018; “Sincerely Yours”, Torrance Art Museum, 2015. In 2018, she was awarded the Hopper Prize. Various museum collections contain her works, such as the Dallas Art Museum and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been written about extensively, most notably in ArtMaze Magazine, Juxtapoz, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Studio Visit Magazine, and twice in New American Paintings, including the cover as selected by curator Anne Ellegood.

Luisa Rabbia (1970, Pinerolo, Italy) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, Italy. The artist blends the distinctions made between the human and the natural, expressing solidarity with the cosmos through the organic, bodily landscapes of her expansive paintings. The scale of Rabbia’s paintings suits the themes she explores, oftentimes depicting overlapping abstracted figures joining and breaking apart, seemingly overcoming their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Continually in flux and transforming, her forms created in expressive hues also evoke spiritual transitions. Upon closer viewing and bringing this substantial work to a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with its rhythmically scraped paint, the stratification of pencil marks, and imprints of fingertips. Rabbia alludes to the minute traces that each person leaves over the course of a lifetime, yet simultaneously asserts an expansive and interconnected vision of a wider universe.

Among her solo shows: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice; Fondazione Merz, Turin. Among group shows: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, New York; Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Biennale del Disegno 2016, Museo della Città, Rimini; Lismore Castle; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York; Maison Particulière, Brussels; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Università di Harvard, Cambridge; Museo del Novecento, Milan; MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.