Jesse Schlesinger
FRIEZE LOS ANGELES 2024
29 February - 3 March | Booth D06
Santa Monica Airport
Anthony Meier is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new works by San Francisco-based artist Jesse Schlesinger at Frieze Los Angeles 2024.
Jesse Schlesinger (b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in sculpture, site-specific installation, drawing, and painting. Featuring a series of sculptures alongside paintings on sandpaper, Schlesinger's Frieze LA presentation demonstrates a versatility across media. The artist displays a clear and playful understanding of precedent, and embarks into new territory, foregrounding concerns around ecology and environment, as well as labor and craftsmanship, across both a contemporary context and a historical perspective predating the modern era.
This new body of work highlights Schlesinger's mastery of materials–– from salvaged redwood and cypress, to traditional enamel paint and ceramic, to more contemporary techniques including powder-coated and chrome-plated steel––highlighting the striking contrasts between the natural tones and vibrant pops of canary yellow or brilliant royal blue. Schlesinger’s seductively textured, two-dimensional sandpaper paintings are created through the action of honing a whetstone, a tool that is used to sharpen the chisels and hand-planes the artist employs in creating certain sculptures. The resulting works, derived from this traditional process, present a ceramic wash against a subtly shimmering sandpaper surface, at once visually dramatic yet sensuous and delicate.
Schlesinger’s particular passion for woodworking is a product of his upbringing as a second-generation carpenter, in which he was trained with an emphasis on traditional craftsmanship. The artist’s time spent in Japan has had an equally important influence—he is a two-time recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In Japan, Schlesinger worked with craftspeople across the country in a wide variety of materials. His interest in, and adoption of, such practices was inspired in part by his work with Zen Buddhist Paul Discoe, who is often credited with bringing traditional Japanese timber-framing to California, and from whom Schlesinger learned these practices.
"There is a paradox to attending to the now in a world of constant flux. Schlesinger’s work captures this compelling contradiction in his juxtaposition of evidence of change (the growth lines of trees, the worn surfaces of stones) with geometric forms that speak of singularity and the ideal. Rendered in steel and ceramic, these forms — lovingly coated with lustrous paint – reveal the artist’s hand even as they reach toward a feeling of impersonal expansiveness. In their monochrome radiance, these forms and their surfaces have something of the self-assured sublimity of Joseph Marioni’s eye-dazzling canvases. In a number of recent pieces, we find these two approaches combined, natural forms turned and molded into Platonic abstractions and then coated with unifying paint or cast in bronze. Through these processes the dizzying swirl of life is brought to a temporary standstill, a point from which we can embrace and enjoy our utterly remarkable existence in time and space."
- excerpt from Art of Touch by Lawrence Rinder, contemporary art curator
Jesse Schlesinger (b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in sculpture, site-specific installation, drawing, and photography. His work is fundamentally concerned with place: how the natural environment, architectural context and engagement, and historical precedent contribute to experience and understanding. Labor and craft are key elements of his practice. Inherent in this work is a reverence for material reflected in the process. His upbringing as a second-generation carpenter (with a focus on traditional craftsmanship) and long-term involvement with a small farm have jointly influenced the philosophy of his work.
Schlesinger has exhibited at galleries and museums in the US and Japan. He is a 2018 and 2020 recipient of the JUSFC Fellowship through the NEA for artistic endeavors in Japan. He is currently working towards completion of two large-scale, permanent public artworks for the city of San Francisco that will utilize bronze, concrete, wood, stone, and glass. He is a founding artist of the Minnesota Street Project Artist Studio facility in San Francisco. In 2012 he was shortlisted for SFMOMA’s SECA award.