The American takes strange film stills and turns them into monumental watercolours, full of Catholic guilt and paranoia – and it’s made him the most talked-about painter of the moment
‘A
ll paintings are in their own way accusations and confessions,” says Joseph Yaeger. “It’s what Polygrapher is about.” This is the title of the artist’s new exhibition, his first since joining the prestigious London gallery Modern Art in 2024, for whom it marks the opening of new premises in St James’s.
Honesty is important to Yaeger, whose upbringing in the US in Helena, a town that he says ambitiously calls itself the capital of Montana, was as decent as it was unremarkable. “We’d sit down for dinner together every night, we’d go to church every Sunday, we’re polite almost to a fault, and traditional in almost all senses of the word.”
His prodigious work ethic is further evidence of a sound upbringing: when we meet in his studio, a week or so before the exhibition opens, the 17 paintings to be included in Polygrapher are long gone and the wall is covered instead with canvases headed for his New York gallery, Gladstone, next year. “I work many, many months ahead, probably just as a way of dealing with my own anxieties,” he says with a hefty dose of self-deprecation.
