WHAAM! is pleased to present Life is Sick, a solo exhibition by Justin Hager, on view April 25 through May 17, 2025. This marks Hager's second solo show with the gallery. 

Life is Sick invites viewers into a world where the boundaries between fairytales and real life blur. Through a vivid collection of oil paintings, this exhibition explores timeless themes—good and evil, reality and fantasy, heroines and villains—casting them not as opposites, but as forces in constant dialogue. Each piece reveals the tension and beauty in duality, asking viewers to look deeper into the spaces where contradiction lives.

At the heart of the show is a celebration of the misunderstood and the overlooked. Outcasts and underdogs take center stage, portrayed not as broken or tragic, but as powerful figures navigating their own mythologies. Whether facing towering adversaries or quiet internal struggles, these characters reflect the artist’s empathy for those who live on the margins—both in stories and in the modern cityscape.

Hager continues with his technique of hand-molded frames to complement its painting—treating the border not as a boundary, but as an extension of the story within. These sculptural frames are part of the narrative, often echoing the characters, environments, or symbols in the artwork itself. Through this show, the artist deepens his exploration of oil painting’s expressive potential and the tactile craft of frame-making, merging the two into one immersive experience.

Life is Sick is both a reflection and a release—a space where struggle, wonder, and strange beauty all get to exist at once.

About Justin Hager

Hager is a self-taught artist living and working in New York.  Life is Sick—his second showing with  Whaam!—continues his exploration of uncovering the profound beauty that resides in the mundane, the overlooked, and the rejected. His paintings are not just representations of scenes or subjects; they are invitations to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. Through techniques and mediums including impasto applications of Rococo-like spackle work inspired by the architecture of New York City and oil sticks, Hager aims to make the ugly pretty, turn angst into beauty and find delicacy, vulnerability and honesty in the hardened. Hager has participated in solo and group shows in New York, Japan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denmark, Sweden, England, and France.