NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s S|2, the gallery arm of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department, and Cultural Counsel present Fish People, a week-long exhibition of The Estate of Joel Mesler at The Surf Lodge in Montauk. On view on 21 – 28 July 2016, Fish People features a selection of ten paintings by the artist-dealer, each of which responds to the cultural history of the sea, New York City’s annual migration to Long Island resort towns, and vacation-induced identity shifts. With his trademark wit and idiosyncratic figurative style, Mesler presents a body of work that is both as vacant and generous as a long weekend by the sea.

Composed on raw linen with an economy of gesture and palette, the subjects of these nuanced paintings float in isolation. A grinning man wears a shirt emblazoned “Down and Out in Montauk,” a nod to Orwell seemingly at odds with the comfort radiating from the painting. Elsewhere, Mesler references nautical history, pairing a reduced seascape with a seafaring rhyme and the submerged outline of Melville’s white whale. Across this body of work, it becomes clear that the sea itself is not the subject, but rather, how we encounter it, whether in a state of temporary withdrawal from our everyday lives, or within a work of art. This sentiment is most clear in “Untitled (I’m Moonlighting),” which depicts a figure in a canoe at night, drawing as he drags a paintbrush through the water. The painting reads, “I’m moonlighting”, a reminder of the Mesler’s role as both a painter and an art dealer, a dichotomy that has historically existed in the careers of art world characters from Marcel Duchamp to Maurizio Cattelan.

Fish People is Mesler’s second exhibition with Cultural Counsel and first collaboration between Cultural Counsel and S|2. The Estate of Joel Mesler was previously shown at NADA New York with Cultural Counsel in May 2016. This installation focused on the magnitude of his output; unframed drawings were hung salon style in tight formation, allowing reoccurring characters, symbols, and bits of text to create a shifting, hazy narrative of artistic creation and middle-age ennui. By comparison, these new paintings are more serene, though they do not totally leave behind the angst of the city.

Fish People is S|2’s first exhibition in Montauk following a series of pop-up exhibitions the gallery has organized in such cities as Los Angeles, Palm Beach, San Francisco and Amsterdam.