Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai is pleased to present Joel Mesler: Spiritual Journey, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Asia. Encompassing around 50 paintings, the presentation illuminates Mesler’s signature artistic style—characterized by bold colors, stylized patterns, bright figuration, and unique calligraphic scripts. As the title suggests, the exhibition reveals aspects of Mesler’s personal and artistic growth, allowing viewers to evolve alongside the artist as they travel through the exhibition space.

In tracing Mesler’s painterly practice, the exhibition features formative examples of his iconic text and image paintings, including Untitled (Half Full Half Empty) (2020)—the earliest work in the presentation and a visual manifestation of the well-known idiom. Like the American artist Harold Edgerton’s renowned Milk Drop Coronet (1957), the canvas captures liquid in motion—here, splashing in a glass— with contrasting yellow and red straws representing the juxtaposition of optimistic and pessimistic mindsets. The work finds parallel in Untitled (On the Rocks) (2021), which presents a drink-laden tumbler and alludes to the joys and intrigues of nightlife, along with paintings like Untitled (Celebration) (2021). The duality of light and dark, dusk and dawn, have long engaged the artist. Canvases such as Untitled (Sunrise Sunset) (2021) and Untitled (We Are the World) (2022) portray the positivity and rebirth that attend each new day.