Joshua Hagler’s The Living Circle Us is the artist's third solo exhibition with Unit London. Curated by writer, art historian and leading authority on modern American art, David Anfam, the exhibition marks a continuing shift within Hagler's subject matter.

The show’s title, drawn from the poem “Metamorphosis” by Louise Glück, is evocative of this shift. For Hagler, the verse speaks to life during the global pandemic, the birth of his now ten-month-old daughter and his relocation to rural New Mexico. Relinquishing socio-political messaging in favour of a more intimate sense of being attentive to his immediate world, he sets an important parameter for the exhibition: to respond only to the visual information he encounters in his day-to-day life.

The exhibition's curator, David Anfam notes:

"Joshua Hagler's recent works mark an important move forward into mysterious, more intuitive realms. Memory plays a key role, but so does Hagler's visceral contact with surrounding reality. This includes the deserted buildings and fire-scorched landscape of southwestern New Mexico where he lives – as well as the birth of his daughter not long ago. Distant echoes from the Old Masters mingle with brooding chromatic fields to create a blurred yet vivid cartography of consciousness. At once dream-like and intensely physical, Hagler's painterly meditations on life, love, death and landscape could not be more timely as visual poems addressing existence in today's troubled world."