Jason Jägel: A Creature Having A Dream About Himself

SAN FRANCISCO—Harman Projects is pleased to present A Creature Having A Dream About Himself, a solo exhibition by artist Jason Jägel. The exhibition marks Jägel’s debut solo exhibition with Harman Projects.

In A Creature Having A Dream About Himself, Jason Jägel’s paintings depict auto-biographical fictional worlds where anything can happen. Through bold layered applications of color, lines, figures, and writing, each piece presents a place with its own inner life and possibilities, reflecting the artist’s selfhood and subconsciousness.

In Curtains! soft pastel-colored brushstrokes evoke a dreamy state. At center, a head is turned to face a slightly undefined character, appearing to exchange whispers behind paper sheets. Throughout the composition, figures emerge in various states of being. This sense of perpetual mutability is largely shaped by the artist’s practice in which intuition and improvisation give way to storytelling, where meaning and language are fluid and a greater world is implied.

Jason Jägel (born in 1971 in Boston, MA and based in San Francisco) is a painter, educator, and commissioned public artist. His work uses the syntax of comics to conjure fictional worlds where anything can happen at anytime, like everyday life. “I want to create a place with its own inner life and see what happens,” says Jägel.

He received an MFA from Stanford University in 2002. His work is in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Jägel has completed numerous commissioned public artworks in San Francisco, all in the context of transforming neighborhoods and innovative large-scale projects. His 2019 commission, The Author & Her Story, a 13x34 foot ceramic tile mosaic installed at San Francisco International Airport’s Harvey Milk Terminal 1.