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Polygrapher Joseph Yaeger
Joseph YaegerPolygrapher
15 November 2025 – 17 January 2026
Modern Art is pleased to present Polygrapher, the first solo exhibition by Joseph Yaeger since announcing his representation by the gallery, and the inaugural exhibition at our Bennet Street gallery.
Polygrapher denotes both the exhibition title and a text written by the artist, published in the exhibition’s accompanying booklet. Taking the form of an interrogation the artist underwent attached to a Stoelting UltraScribe––and in which only the answers have been transcribed––it creates a framework for the experience of the subsequent paintings. Masks, paint, screens, taped-over goggles, debris, foam, the paintings' obscured subjects echo the alleged verity laid out within the text.
The paintings in the exhibition are produced with watercolour on thickly gessoed canvas or linen. Yaeger values the materiality of the pockmarked and textured gesso in addition to the vicissitudes of the watercolour pigment. His compositions are typically cropped, both revealing and curtailing the viewer’s encounter with a scene, fostering an atmosphere of emotional and spatial ambiguity. While Yaeger’s writing practice evokes these phantasmatic spaces, the paintings in the exhibition attempt to grasp what language cannot convey.
Along with the layers of gesso, there are almost always layers upon layers of paintings underneath the finished works. Yaeger doesn’t ever erase back to white, instead muddling the color down to a red-brown hue—“a ground like the one Titian would have used,” he says. For some canvases, the artist will work directly on that ground, and for others he will again apply layers of gesso.
Joseph Yaeger in conversation with Benjamin Barlow, 2024
The preparation of the canvas can take days or even months, after which the artist essentially pours out a shallow pool of color in the composition of each picture. And that means he must paint on the floor, and quickly. “I am essentially going to mass every single day and doing a lot of kneeling,” he says. “No matter what, there is something about the act of being in a certain level of discomfort that I think the work needs in my mind, in order to get into the devotional state—and I think that’s probably just being raised Catholic.”
Joseph Yaeger in conversation with Benjamin Barlow, 2024
Joseph Yaeger was born in 1986 in Helena, Montana, and lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art, London (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include: Antenna Space, Shanghai (2024); The Perimeter, London (2023); Project Native Informant, London (2021); V.O. Curations, London (2020).
For more information, please contact Sam Talbot (sam@sam-talbot.com) or Saskia Hartman Davies (saskia@modernart.net).
Related
Press Release
Modern Art is pleased to present Polygrapher, the first solo exhibition by Joseph Yaeger since announcing his representation by the gallery, and the inaugural exhibition at our Bennet Street gallery.
Polygrapher denotes both the exhibition title and a text written by the artist, published in the exhibition’s accompanying booklet. Taking the form of an interrogation the artist underwent attached to a Stoelting UltraScribe––and in which only the answers have been transcribed––it creates a framework for the experience of the subsequent paintings. Masks, paint, screens, taped-over goggles, debris, foam, the paintings' obscured subjects echo the alleged verity laid out within the text.
The paintings in the exhibition are produced with watercolour on thickly gessoed canvas or linen. Yaeger values the materiality of the pockmarked and textured gesso in addition to the vicissitudes of the watercolour pigment. His compositions are typically cropped, both revealing and curtailing the viewer’s encounter with a scene, fostering an atmosphere of emotional and spatial ambiguity. While Yaeger’s writing practice evokes these phantasmatic spaces, the paintings in the exhibition attempt to grasp what language cannot convey.
Joseph Yaeger was born in 1986 in Helena, Montana, and lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art, London (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include: Antenna Space, Shanghai (2024); The Perimeter, London (2023); Project Native Informant, London (2021); V.O. Curations, London (2020). For more information, please contact Sam Talbot (sam@sam-talbot.com) or Saskia Hartman Davies (saskia@modernart.net).