Deploying words and images, Joel Mesler draws from childhood memories and life experiences to create paintings that meld his private impressions with cultural touchstones. Often evoking his youth in 1980s Los Angeles, his signature artistic style is characterized by bold colors, stylized patterns, bright figuration, and unique calligraphic scripts. Calling to mind diverse influences—from the imagined jungles of Henri Rousseau to forms found in 20th-century decorative arts—Mesler’s canvases offer a wry, vulnerable examination of the place where personal and popular iconography convene. Events in the artist’s life, both joys and personal traumas, form his greatest artistic inspiration. The motifs he employs recall his upbringing in Southern California—such as the patterned banana leaf wallpaper of the Beverly Hills Hotel, swimming pools, beach balls, balloons, disco balls, and donuts. His visually polished works undergird his connection to the legacy of Pop art, while his use of text places him in a lineage of artists including Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool.

Born in 1974 in Los Angeles, Mesler graduated from Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, and received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999. Subsequently, he worked as an artist and art dealer in Los Angeles and New York for two decades—opening his first gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown—and he became an early supporter of renowned artists including Henry Taylor and Rashid Johnson. While Mesler began painting in the early 2000s and continued throughout the decade, it was not until the mid-2010s that he committed to his practice. The artist’s pictorialism combines techniques gained throughout his dynamic career. He studied lithography as a student and initially worked professionally as a printmaker. This background informs Mesler’s practice of hand-dyeing his linen canvases, allowing him to achieve a distinctive saturation and gradation of color in many of his works. His paintings have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Simon Lee, London (2018); Harper’s Books, New York (2020); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Lévy Gorvy, Hong Kong (2021); LGDR, Palm Beach and London (2022); and the Long Museum, Shanghai (2023). Mesler lives and works in East Hampton, New York.