Æmen Ededéen will now be represented by Maruani Mercier Gallery, which will host the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in January 2026. The upcoming solo show will feature work from the artist’s ongoing mixed-media painting series “The Glass Dream Game.” Some of these works were recently shown by the Belgian gallery at Art Brussels in April.
The artist, who began his career making political art, has since started making more symbolic, intuitive work. His process includes rituals that engage with patterns he senses in the world, resulting in bright, layered canvases, rich with allusion. “In the past, I made political work to confront the culture,” he said in an interview with ArtPlugged. “Now, I see it was also a way to avoid confronting myself.”
Born on an Air Force base in Mountain Home, Idaho, Ededéen—formerly known as Joshua Hagler—was raised in rural evangelical communities in Illinois, Arizona, and California. He is a first-generation college graduate who received a BFA from the University of Arizona.
Following a 2018 grant from the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Ededéen relocated to New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife and daughter in the high desert village of Placitas.
In “The Glass Dream Game,” Ededéen begins each painting by using a random number generator to select six books from his library, then opens each to a single page to create what he calls a “Hexagram.” He studies the content of those pages—text, images, or even blanks—to identify patterns, symbols, or coincidences, which he reorganizes into a narrative structure he calls the “Trial,” followed by a written “Dream” and a final visual “Vision.” The resulting painting emerges through layered mixed-media techniques, including scraping and embedding glass beads.
Museum exhibitions include “The River Lethe” at the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, both in 2018. More recently, he presented solo exhibitions “Drawing in the Dark” at Cris Worley Fine Arts in Dallas and “The Living Circle Us” at London’s Unit in 2021. A new monograph, titled Nihil: Joshua Hagler in New Mexico, written by John Yau, will be published on 24th July.
