GLENDALE — Mek Contemporary presents “Idols In Bloom,” the gallery’s inaugural exhibition and a solo presentation of work by Rafael Megall. On view from September 24 through November 6, the exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday, September 24, 6–8 p.m.
“Idols In Bloom” brings together paintings in which porcelain figurines, floral forms, and Armenian ornament appear in states of repetition, fragmentation, and recombination. Across the exhibition, Megall considers how objects and images acquire meaning through personal and collective memory, and how inherited forms can remain alive through transformation.
At the center of the exhibition is an expanded conception of the idol. In Megall’s work, an idol is not necessarily an object of worship, but something invested with significance through attachment, memory, and experience. His figures draw from the decorative porcelain figurines commonly found in Soviet-era domestic interiors. Collected, displayed, and often passed between generations, these objects became part of the visual language of everyday life, carrying associations with family, home, and a social world that has since changed.
Megall subjects these familiar figures to a process of fragmentation and reassembly. He reconfigures their forms and combines pieces to create new composite bodies. Rather than reconstructing a lost original, the paintings allow new forms to emerge from what remains. Their instability reflects the way memory itself is reconstructed: partial, layered, and continually altered by time and experience.
Armenian ornament moves through the paintings as an active structure rather than a decorative border. Megall draws on inherited ornamental traditions and reshapes them within his own visual language. The patterns weave through the figures, alternately obscuring and revealing them while linking separate elements across the composition. Flowers introduce a parallel language of growth and change. In the larger compositions, flowers, ornament, and porcelain bodies overlap within dense fields of image and pattern; in the smaller panel paintings, botanical forms appear independently, concentrating the exhibition’s concerns with transience, remembrance, and renewal.
The title “Idols in Bloom” brings these elements together. The idol suggests attachment and inherited meaning, while the bloom suggests emergence and continued life. Megall holds these states in tension, approaching fracture not simply as loss but as a condition from which something else can take form. Across the exhibition, Megall suggests that continuity does not depend on remaining unchanged, but on the ability of images, objects, and cultural forms to be transformed, reassembled, and seen anew.
