The Chimera originates in Greek mythology, a beast with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. In everyday language, it's come to mean something which is hoped for, but is impossible to achieve.

Joshua Hagler's large-scale oil paintings represent an excavation of time – layers of semi-realistic figures and historic scenes are distorted by marks, smears, cuts and puddles which render the images partially abstract, and allude to memory. “I want the paintings to have the feeling of vague recollection, a memory that starts to form but disappears,” Hagler says.

Joshua Hagler was born in Mountain Town, Idaho in 1979 and spent his formative years living between rural llinois and Arizona. Hagler graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2002 and currently works and resides alongside his partner Maja Ruznic, a fellow contemporary painter, in Los Angeles, California. Since 2006, Hagler has exhibited at both group and solo shows in galleries and museums across North and South America, Europe, and Australia. In the summer of 2017, he was awarded a place on MICA’s Alfred and Trafford Klots Program for Artists in Brittany, France and undertook a year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico. His project proposal for a large-scale installation and exhibition was chosen by the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles was debuted in the summer of 2018.