Michael Benevento is pleased to present Landscape, a solo exhibition of twelve new paintings by San Francisco based artist Jason Jägel.

Jason Jägel’s universe of work is rich with details—layers of narrative, emotion, character, architecture, and text. Belonging to the San Francisco, Mission School generation, Jägel is most recognized for his distinctive paintings and commissioned public artworks, as well as record cover designs for artists such as MF DOOM, Madlib and others. Jägel has completed twelve commissioned public artworks, his most recent commission is The author and her story, a 13 x 34 foot ceramic tile mosaic installed at the San Francisco International Airport, Harvey Milk Terminal 1.

In his new work, Jägel uses landscape as a jumping off point—a place of exploration, contemplation, and reprise. Rooted in improvisation and daily practice, Jägel’s compositions alternate between representation and pure abstraction, offering poignant suggestions of the recognizable. Visually in motion, each gesture opens a door to a new set of possibilities.

For the first time in over 30 years of painting, Jägel works exclusively in oil on linen, muslin, and canvas, over panel. Using an array of large to small treasured brushes, bamboo-pole brush holders, sticks, palette knives and rags, Jägel gestures his way through this body of work, often using his non-dominant hand as a way to enliven the image outcome.

Exercising a distinctive color palette (warms and cools) that only comes from decades of painting, Jägel masterfully offers a story using, shape, form and mark-making. In order to find the most authentic moments, Jägel reduces his actions to essential characteristics. More and less, aggressive and gentle, thick and thin, it is amidst this topographical reduction that Jägel finds freedom and rawness.

On the occasion of Jason Jägel’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Michael Benevento is happy to share an interview between gallery Director Bob Linder and Jason Jägel. This interview can be found available for download on the gallery website.

Jason Jägel born in 1971, Boston, MA is a 2023-24 Pollock-Krasner recipient. A monograph of his work entitled, Seventy-Three Funshine was published in 2008 by Electric Works, San Francisco. His work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The UCLA Hammer Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, among others. He lives and works in San Francisco, CA.