NEW YORK, NY.- Bernarducci Meisel Gallery presents Jack Mendenhall's first solo exhibition with the Gallery entitled Pools of Paradise. His prolific career spans over 50 years and includes optimistic scenes of tropical getaways. The paintings of resorts in popular American destinations such as Waikiki, Scottsdale, Las Vegas, and Miami depict familiar scenes of middle class Americans on vacation.
Mendenhall is a first generation Photorealist. His work has been included in all four volumes on the subject by Louis K. Meisel. Mendenhall’s contribution to the genre is expertly rendered leisure with a suggested narrative. Children splash around in floaties in Water Spouts Waikiki (2014). The bystanders are unaware that they are being watched. No one is posing, which points to a relaxed attitude of the people in the paintings. The pool sides are not overly glorified nor are the people in and around them.
In Woman Reading Newspaper (2015) a woman reclines face-down on a poolside chaise and casually reads the newspaper. An assortment of finished drinks surrounds her; two empty plastic cups resting on the side table near her and a water bottle at the foot of the chaise. White towels rest on the ground near the woman waiting for a pool attendant to pick them up. Damp spots on the pool deck mark the footsteps of another person we do not see in the composition – as the spots lead off the picture plane. Giving us ample details to generate our own narrative, Mendenhall succeeds at painting a true Pool of Paradise.
Mendenhall’S work is a significant milestone in the trajectory of contemporary Photorealist painting. The minimal pool paintings by David Hockney and Hilo Chen’s paintings of woman laying on beaches come to mind. However, it is only Mendenhall that can verily recreate the glistening sunrays over the artificially blue waters of a pool. It is clear that Mendenhall has a unique and distinguishable way of translating this type of imagery. His refreshing and humorously voyeuristic approach to image making presents an unfiltered reality of nostalgic moments lost in time and captured timelessly in a painting.
Mendenhall was born in 1937 and lives and works in Oakland, California. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he also taught. He received a Purchase Award from the Butler Institute of American Art, and has exhibited in the Tokyo Biennial as well as a traveling exhibition, Realism Since 1960. His work is in the collections of the University of California, Berkeley and the Oakland Museum.
