At Independent, Joel Mesler’s ‘Death Wish’ Is Part Art Exhibit, Part Market Experiment

At a coffee shop in Little Italy late last month, Joel Mesler leaned back in his chair and started explaining how he used to sell art in New York. Back when he was running galleries in the Lower East Side in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he said, deals often came together late at night, after too many drinks, as he mingled with people who he thought were far above his station.

“I would want to be at the table, but I wasn’t invited,” Mesler said, pausing to sip an iced coffee. Then he smiled. “Then they realized, ‘Joel can get some cocaine.’ And all of a sudden I’m a part of it—I’m at the billionaire table.” 

The story spiraled from there: handwritten discounts scribbled onto his hand at parties; invoices sent the next morning to collectors and blue-chip dealers who may or may not have actually agreed to buy works by artists like Henry Taylor and Loie Hollowell­; the invoices being paid regardless; and the strange social hustle required to survive as a scrappy downtown dealer before he returned to art-making full-time.

Now, nearly a decade after leaving the gallery business behind, Mesler is returning to it, at least partly, and without the dangerously romanticized debauchery.

At Independent this week, Mesler will debut a new series of figurative paintings in a presentation titled “Joel Mesler Presented by The Estate of Joel Mesler,” a deliberately strange name with a healthy peppering of both reinvention and self-mythology. The project, titled “Interiors,” marks a sharp departure from the colorful text paintings and cheerful iconography that defined Mesler’s art over the past several years. 

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

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

For Mesler the project lies somewhere between a traditional art fair booth and a controlled market experiment. The works will not be sold through a gallery sales team. Instead, only Mesler himself and David Kordansky, his former dealer, can sell the work. Part of the experiment involves Mesler willingly extricating himself from Kordansky’s gallery roster.

“It’s only literally David Kordansky himself that can offer these paintings,” Mesler said. “If you try calling his sales team or a senior director, well best of luck to you.” 

The setup reflects a broader frustration Mesler has with today’s contemporary art market, which he believes has lost the intimacy, exclusivity, and unpredictability that defined it during the rowdy early aughts. In Mesler’s telling, too much contemporary art now functions like luxury inventory: endlessly scalable, endlessly available, and increasingly detached from personal relationships.

The artist-turned-gallerist-turned-artist wants to reverse that dynamic, effectively building a market for himself from scratch. Prices for the new series will, he said, sit far below the six-figure sums his more recognizable paintings—foil balloons that spell out “courage” set upon a misty plum and blue sky or heart-filled landscapes scrawled with “I love you” in hot pink cursive letters—now command. But unlike these older works, which he increasingly treats as public-facing and accessible, these new paintings will be tightly controlled.

“To be honest, I would rather rich people not have it,” he said. 

That philosophy partly explains the split currently emerging in Mesler’s career. On one side is the polished, highly visible Joel Mesler brand, which includes public commissions and large-scale collaborations, like a mosaic floor at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, as well as merchandise and commercial licensing deals, like a recent one that spread his imagery across one of Bangkok’s largest shopping malls. On the other side is this new body of figurative work, which Mesler speaks about protectively. The paintings, many depicting isolated or emotionally vulnerable figures, reconnect him with a style he had largely abandoned before becoming a dealer.

The Independent presentation, according to a press release, “returns to an early, personal figurative language” and explores vulnerability, recovery, and self-representation. One of these dozen pictures shows a chubby, balding man, shirtless, in a small dinghy. He’s not out alone on the open sea. It’s worse: he seems to be paddling forward in a red box. What hope can you have, Mesler seems to say, when there’s no place to go? In Receiving, five tight-lipped figures in tight clothes reach up into the heavens with ghastly, puffed fingers, as if waiting for some message from on high.

Mesler got sober shortly before leaving New York for the Hamptons in 2016, after his gallery business had effectively collapsed. “I was broken,” he said. “I had nothing left.” 

In the Hamptons, where he initially continued operating a gallery while painting in the basement, Mesler said he found an audience that responded not only to the work, but to his personality and openness. “People were like, this guy is super real and honest,” he recalled, adding that collectors started to pay attention when seeing the work Out East, away from the mania of New York’s market.

The Estate of Joel Mesler project seems designed to merge all of those identities at once: dealer, artist, hustler, recovering addict, market critic, and brand-builder. At the same time, Mesler doesn’t want to fully retreat from the more commercial side of his practice. Near the end of the conversation, he pulled out his phone to show me AI-generated videos based on his books and artworks, created with collaborators overseas. He hopes to build a larger media ecosystem around the more accessible side of his work, comparing the ambition, somewhat improbably, to “Mr. Rogers.” (Kordansky, however, has encouraged him to keep this new body of work separate from all of that. “He’s like, keep this one real,” Mesler said. “Don’t bullshit this.”)

For now, at least, Mesler appears happy occupying multiple personas at once: the populist and the gatekeeper, the artist and the dealer, the public brand and the private market operator.

“The estate of Joel Mesler presented by Joel Mesler,” he said, laughing. “Because it might work; or it could be a death wish.”