“My process is something like a stage rehearsal,a performance that seeks to imitate the subject matter onwhich the work comments. Painting is a way to stay nearmy subject matter, to cast myself as part of the mythology,to remember that I’m not separate from it, since, in fact,my religion, even if I no longer have a sense of faith, is apart of who I am.”November 25, 2008
Press Contact
Wendi Norris or Raman Frey
Frey Norris Gallery
T: 415-346.-7812
wendi@freynorris.com
raman@freynorris.com
Josh Hagler: 72 Virgins to Die For
February 5 – March 1, 2009
• Exhibition features 14 new paintings, 3mixed media installations.• 20 page catalogue available with essay bySan Francisco Bay Guardian art criticAri Messer.• Debut solo exhibition precedes Europeandebut solo show in spring, 2010 inFrankfurt, Germany.• Highly controversial themes aroundreligious and political exploitation ofvirginity mythologies anchors show tomany explosive current events.SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Frey Norris Gallery is pleased to present our debut solo exhibition for Bay Area artist Josh Hagler. The 72 virgins of the title will populate a series of 14 paintings and receive varied treatment through three installations in a variety of materials. The dialogue between the three dimensional and two dimensional works engages with fetishes around purity, ritual cleansing and the cult of the virgin as it has manifested in various cultures
throughout history and into the present. Hagler examines purity in the context of political power, when it acts as a proxy for capricious divine providence, the Wrathful Hand of God. He tackles these immensely charged and controversial themes with dexterity and empathy, having come himself from a community of faith and experienced a difficult ideological separation from this group.
Hagler has a background in illustration and begins each painting with a composite sketch on a computer, sometimes pastiched together from select news clippings, and then makes a
rough drawing on the canvas. His immersive process moves from a basic compositional rendering to violent exhaustion and an often Baroque literary title when a work nears completion.
72 Virgins to Die For references an obscure hadith by Imam al-Tirmidhi, describing paradise as a palace of 80,000 servants with 72 ‘virgins’ or ‘wives’ for each faithful resident. This virgin identity also corresponds to the allegory of the moth in Sufic tradition, which communes with God by destroying itself in its attraction to the flame. Hence many works incorporate actual moths.
Josh Hagler's artwork has exhibited in galleries in London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. In 2006, Hagler was one of ten artists chosen by the Saatchi Gallery and UK Guardian to exhibit in London. He soon after was selected in an Artinterview.com international competition to exhibit in Berlin in 2009. Hagler was a finalist for the 2007 Tournesol Award for Bay Area artists. He is the recipient of the Wildgift Movement Grant, which awarded the artist full financial support to produce the exhibition 72 Virgins to Die For. In the spring of 2010, Hagler will receive his European debut solo exhibition, at Galerie Raphael in Frankfurt, Germany.
About the ArtA scene of devastation from a newspaper photo of the killing of Benazir Bhutto, including broken and littered corpses and vehicles, transforms through Hagler’s painting process into a mutating and fused triumvirate of sleeping babies in The Assassination. Bhutto’s death draws virgin-martyr comparisons, more deeply and blatantly explored in the painting Virgin Martyr, a scene of a woman, perhaps the subject’s mother, in black headscarf and red blouse, strapping a suicide bomber’s belt to a pubescent girl wrapped in a white shawl and hooded in a black ski mask. The creation of both paintings concluded in the brutal flinging of thick paint at their surfaces, covering them in a vigorous energy that, in the case of The Assassination, traps the bodies of actual dead moths. Large canvases such as The Prophet’s Wife I (after Munch’s Puberty) and The Prophet’s Wife II (after Schiele’s Act Against Colored Material) directly alludes to both a historical eroticizing of girls on the verge of puberty and various precedents of religious polygamy. Shed traditional Mormon clothes in both paintings reference the many marriages of renegade Mormon leader Warren Jeffs to young girls, one of whom called child protective services. In both paintings, the model’s face is erased, in Magritte green-apple fashion, by a round Petri-dish-like circle containing a single polychromatic moth.
The face of a central heaving character, his red wet flesh apparently deprived of skin, in Golgotha is similarly obscured, only this time by the bird like face of the Ortolan. Surrounding him are the heads of so many “consumers” veiled by napkins. The bleeding, central, bird-headed figure drags a large cross beneath what appear to be flying portions of splattering meat. The Ortolan, in culinary tradition, is a tiny bird to be eaten whole, bones and all, beneath a white cloth covering the heads of those eating, so as to hide their shame from God. Hagler’s tiny painting Just One More Tiny Sacrifice for the Greater Good, Then We Can Rest Easy Knowing depicts the tied dead bird in a pot of black sauce, rendered mostly in sickly ochres and greens. In The Virgin Queen, Hagler references the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (circa 1588-9), attributed to George Gower, a cut down version of which can be found in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The painting is full of symbolism. The queen’s hand rests on a globe and she’s draped in the regal wealth of Royal Brittania, but in Hagler’s version her face flushes away from the viewer in a spiraling swirl, disappearing at its mid-point like a colorful oceanic whirlpool.
Suggestive narratives are repeated in the three installations. One installation depicts a turquoise Mormon dress, symbolic of purity, standing erect and illuminated from within, approached by a swarm of moths. Virginity also features in the installation [title here], which explores the increasingly popular Evangelical Purity Ball, a kind of prom for fathers and daughters in which the daughter must pledge her virginity to her protector parent. An implied romance and eroticism evocative of incest taboos arises from the table setting by candlelight, the printed “purity pledge” like dinner menus, and the painting of a father embracing his daughter from behind.
About Frey Norris GalleryFocusing on important Bay Area artists and internationally recognized artists from Asia, Frey Norris Gallery provides one of San Francisco's most welcoming and dynamic venues for experiencing and purchasing contemporary art. Frey Norris Gallery exhibits paintings, works on paper (including drawings, pastels and watercolors), collage, sculpture, installations, video and innovative photographic media.
Frey Norris Gallery Gallery Hours
456 Geary Street Tuesday – Saturday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
San Francisco, CA 94102 Sunday 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
T: 415.346.7812 Closed Monday
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Next at Frey Norris Gallery: In March 2009, Frey Norris Gallery will present Mudassar Manzoor and Attiya Shaukat: Contemporary Miniature Paintings. Manzoor and Shaukat are two up and coming artists who graduated from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, both working with contemporary and often deeply conflicted themes. Together, the artists
will contribute a total of fifteen new miniature paintings. This exhibition marks their first showing in the United States. Shaukat's work often features a single image placed carefully on patterned or gridded paper, with imagery that conjures associations such as a twisted spine or wheelchair, referencing a crippling accident she suffered while an art student and garnering her comparisons to the life and career of Frida Kahlo. Manzoor's themes are often more subtle, revealing themselves once time and place add context. For example, his most recent body of work presents deep hues of rich green and yellow organic forms. Upon closer inspection and after viewing an accompanying timeline the viewer discovers that the entire body of work is an outpouring of turbid emotions following the assassination of Pakistan’s slain leader Benazir Bhutto.
