Joel Mesler Returns to His Dealer Roots With New Independent Booth

Late last month, in a cafe in Little Italy, Joel Meisler leaned back in his chair and began explaining how he used to sell art in New York. He said that when he ran a gallery on the Lower East Side in the late 2000s and early 2010s, deals were often struck late at night and after too much alcohol as he hobnobbed with people he considered far above his own station.

“I wanted to sit at the table, but I wasn’t invited,” Mesler said, pausing to sip an iced coffee. Then he laughed. “Then they realized, ‘Joel can get some cocaine.'” All of a sudden, I was a part of it — I was sitting on a billionaire’s desk. ”

The story unfolds: Discounts scrawled on his hand at parties; invoices sent the next morning to collectors and blue-chip dealers who may or may not agree to buy works by artists like Henry Taylor and Loy Hollowell; invoices paid anyway; and the strange social hustle and bustle he needs to survive as a scrappy inner-city dealer before he returns to making art full-time.

Now, after nearly a decade away from his gallery career, Meisler has returned, at least partially, to the gallery scene without the danger of romanticized debauchery.

This week in The Independent, Mesler will debut a new series of figurative paintings in a talk titled “Joel Mesler Presented by the Estate of Joel Mesler,” a deliberately strange title full of a healthy dose of reinvention and self-mythology. Titled “Interior Design,” the project marks a departure from the colorful word paintings and cheerful images that have defined Meisler’s art in years past.

The new paintings are still cartoonish, but darker, more psychologically revealing, and perhaps most importantly for Meisler: scarce.

“There’s only 12 fucking paintings,” he said. “Boom, that’s it.”

For Mesler, the project falls somewhere between a traditional art fair stall and a controlled market experiment. These works will not be sold through the gallery sales team. Instead, it’s Mesler himself and his David Kordansky previous Dealers, who can sell works. Part of the experiment involved Meisler voluntarily extricating himself from Kordansky’s gallery roster.

“Only David Kordansky himself could provide these paintings,” Meisler said. “Good luck if you try calling his sales team or senior director.”

The setting reflects Meisler’s broader frustration with today’s contemporary art market, which he believes has lost the intimacy, exclusivity and unpredictability that defined its tumultuous early days. According to Meisler, too much contemporary art now acts like luxury goods inventory: infinitely expandable, infinitely available, and increasingly detached from personal relationships.

The artist-turned-gallerist-turned-artist hopes to reverse that dynamic and effectively build a market for himself from the ground up. He said the new collection will cost far less than the six-figure sums of some of his better-known paintings — foil balloons spelling out “Courage” against foggy plums and blue skies, or heart-filled landscapes with “I love you” scrawled in bright pink cursive letters. But unlike his older works, which he increasingly viewed as accessible and accessible to the public, these new paintings would be tightly controlled.

“To be honest, I’d rather rich people didn’t have it,” he said.

This philosophy goes some way to explaining the current schism in Mesler’s career. On one side is the sophisticated, eye-catching Joel Mesler brand, which includes public commissions and large-scale collaborations, such as the mosaic flooring at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, as well as merchandise and commercial licensing deals, such as the recent one to spread his image in one of Bangkok’s largest malls. On the other side is this new figurative work that Meisler talks about protectively. Most of these paintings depict isolated or emotionally vulnerable figures, reconnecting him with a style he had largely abandoned before becoming a dealer.

According to a press release, The Independent’s presentation “returns to the personal figurative language of earlier times” and explores vulnerability, recovery and self-expression. One of the dozen photos shows a chubby, bald man, shirtless, sitting in a dinghy. He was not alone on the high seas. Worse: He appears to be paddling inside a red box. What hope can you have, Messler seems to say, when there is nowhere to go? exist take overIn the picture, five figures wearing tights and tight lips stretched out their terrifying, bulging fingers to the sky, as if waiting for news from above.

In 2016, after his gallery business effectively collapsed, Meisler sobered up shortly before leaving New York for the Hamptons. “I’m heartbroken,” he said. “I have nothing left.”

In the Hamptons, where he initially continued to run a gallery while painting in his basement, Mesler said he found that audiences responded not only to the work but also to his personality and openness. “People felt like, this guy was super real and honest,” he recalls, adding that collectors started paying attention when they saw Out East’s work, away from the frenzy of the New York market.

The Joel Meisler Legacy Project seems designed to meld all of these identities at once: dealer, artist, hustler, recovering addict, market critic, and brand builder. At the same time, Mesler doesn’t want to completely exit the more commercial side of his practice. Toward the end of the conversation, he pulled out his phone and showed me a video that artificial intelligence had produced with overseas collaborators based on his books and artwork. He hopes to build a larger media ecosystem around the more accessible side of his work, a somewhat unlikely comparison of his ambitions to “Mr. Rogers.” (Kordansky, however, encouraged him to keep this new endeavor separate from all his other work. “He was like, keep this real,” Mesler said. “No bullshit.”)

For now at least, Messler seems happy to occupy multiple roles simultaneously: populist and gatekeeper, artist and dealer, public brand and private market operator.

“The legacy of Joel Mesler on display,” he said with a laugh. “Because it might work; or it might be a death wish.”