David Kordansky Gallery presents zrikha sheqi’att hashemesh (Sunrise Sunset), an exhibition of new stunning paintings by Joel Mesler, on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. until 16 December 2023.

Paintings that combine autobiographical reflection, self-effacing humour, an open-minded sense of precision and design, and a cunning conceptualism with roots in a diverse range of modernist and postmodernist approaches to artmaking have made Mesler well-known in recent years. In zrikha sheqi’att hashemesh (Sunrise Sunset), he delves further into each of these genres, exploring the themes of cultural consciousness and communal purpose that have driven him since the start of his multifaceted career.

Nine small-format portraits of rabbis and thirteen large-scale canvases devoted to the text-based imagery and rich visual patterns that have characterised much of his works over the past ten years are the two sets of paintings on display.

Within the framework of the show as a whole, these groups comprise an intricately interwoven story of celebration and loss recounted on both personal and transpersonal scales, even if each of them can be viewed as a separate series with its own formal and material parameters, associated themes, and variations. For example, the rabbis’ paintings are based on a type of artwork that was common in Jewish homes in the United States for most of the postwar era. These artworks frequently functioned as remembrances of the European countries and lifestyles that the families of the owners of these paintings were forced to abandon.

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