Born in 1982 in Mesa (Arizona, United States), Jason Saager lives and works in his hometown.
Jason Saager's work reimagines landscape as an unstable, speculative environment where multiple spatial logics coexist. Drawing on early Italian Renaissance painting, classical Asian landscape traditions, and Surrealism, Saager synthesizes these disparate influences into worlds that are at once calming, estranging, and transformative. His landscapes reveal beauty as a destabilizing force, inviting viewers to inhabit new ways of seeing.
In some works, clouds do not simply make a sense of place believable; they disrupt it, producing shifts that unsettle perception. In others, space fractures and folds, collapsing conventional depth and leaving the rules of pictorial space uncertain. Perspective in Saager's landscapes is intentionally false. Worlds grow and multiply through manipulation and distorted scaling. Smaller instances of the landscape reappear within the larger environment, but never as exact repetitions; fragments return, each subtly altered. Clouds and landforms are layered to emphasize fracturing, producing scenes that feel equally paradisiacal and impossible. Spatial coherence is simultaneously offered and withdrawn. Rather than appearing as a given, place arises through the act of looking.
Saager's process embraces chance and procedural uncertainty. Works often begin as monotype prints made on plexiglass pressed with his own body weight, introducing accident and unpredictability. He then intervenes with paint, applying slowness and clarity while preserving the work's internal tensions. These paintings are realized with the hand of the artist as well as by way of his full physical being, in the service of his peripatetic mind.
Saager's work has been presented in solo exhibitions such as Numinous Overcast at Mario Diacono Gallery, (Boston, USA, 2025), New Lands at Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels, Belgium, 2024), Intermediate Worlds at Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, France, 2023), Sky Gardens at Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels, Belgium, 2022), Ecstatic Outdoors at Ross+Kramer Gallery, (New York, USA, 2021), Scenes From the Time Collapse at St. Paul The Apostle Church (New York, USA, 2015), as well as in numerous group exhibitions such as Le temps du printemps at the Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac (France, 2025), The Sky Was the Ocean That Day at Everybody Gallery (Tucson, USA, 2024), Melvins: Never Say You're Sorry at Public Access Gallery (New York, USA, 2023), SPRING+BREAK Art Show (New York, USA, 2021), My Sweet Doppelgänger at the Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, USA, 2021), Flowers and Beauty at the Washington Project for the Art (Washington, USA, 2017-2016), Karmic at Life on Mars Gallery (New York, USA, 2015) and Paul Klee at Underdonk Gallery (New York, USA, 2015).
Jason Saager holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006) and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York (2012).
He was an artist in residence at the Shape-Walentas Studio Program (New York, USA, 2019-2021), Pioneer Works in Brooklyn (New York, USA, 2014), and the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Montecastello (Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, 2006) He received the Richard Marnin Kaye Award while studying at Hunter College in New York in 2012. Jason Saager has been represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia since 2024.
He was an artist in residence at the Shape-Walentas Studio Program (New York, USA, 2019-2021), Pioneer Works in Brooklyn (New York, USA, 2014), and the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Montecastello (Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, 2006) He received the Richard Marnin Kaye Award while studying at Hunter College in New York in 2012. Jason Saager has been represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia since 2024.