Working for over a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hagler has recently relocated to Los Angeles. Known mainly for his large-scale semi-figurative canvases, the work has followed a natural evolution in the artists’s personal exploration and anxiety around religious thought and its history. Since 2006, he has exhibited his paintings and multi-media installations throughout North America and Europe, including several solo exhibitions.
In 2013, Hagler traveled for three months with collaborator Maja Ruznic through Eastern and Western Europe and the Middle East making art with war refugees, orphans, and the terminally ill while creating the art book Drift. 2013 also included guest lecturing at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, and solo show The Unsurrendered at the university gallery.
In 2012, his animated video projection “The Evangelists” was based on interviews with four middle-aged men dealing with psychological trauma and included Hagler’s former neighbor who burned down their mutual San Francisco apartment building in 2007. The piece was later selected to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and the Royal Institute in Adelaide, Australia.
Hagler has just wrapped up a two-person exhibition with Maja Ruznic at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco and has two solo shows this fall at Avis Frank Gallery in Houston and Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen.
