Nicolette Mishkan: Lethe’s Tavern

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Lethe’s Tavern, a solo exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles based artist on view from May 10 – June 29, 2025.

The scene is mythic but familiar: a half-submerged bacchanal, a haunt for the wandering self. In Lethe’s Tavern, intoxication is both subject and state -- a place where memory slips sideways and where bodies gleam with an otherworldly softness. Mishkan’s figures glisten in states of liquid attention as if in a trance: lips parted, eyes closed or doubled, flesh blurred at the edges as they dissolve into water or smoke. She captures not quite a dream, and not quite death, but rather the fevered pause between the two.

The exhibition’s title references the ancient river Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness that winds through the Greek underworld, but her vision reaches further, into Middle Eastern mysticism, where wine overflows in Sufi mystic poetry as a symbol of ecstatic surrender, annihilation of the ego, and divine intoxication. Her figures, iterations of the artist herself as mermaid, are of this tradition: mythic, feminine, and fractured. They hover somewhere between the sirens of Homer and the bathing scenes of 19th-century Orientalist painting, drawing less from the French artists who fantasized the East than from their source materials, reentering the bathhouse as both its oracle and its ghost.

Rendered in oil on linen, the works are steeped in a narcotic palette: wine-dark reds, ashen roses, greenish greys. Mishkan’s technique balances the anatomical precision of academicism with the fluid drift of devotional painting. Limbs curl and vanish into translucent washes; bodies appear to surface and submerge at once. There is at once an art historical current running through the works, notably the rich interiority of Symbolism (Moreau, Redon) and the mythic surrealism of Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, and an interest in the ultra-contemporary disorienting effects of self-imaging.

Throughout the exhibition, a set of recurring objects anchor the visual field: a fallen glass, poppy petals, latex hoods, decanters with Mesopotamian goddesses carved into them. These are talismans as much as props -- fetish objects in the spiritual sense anchoring paintings that are not scenes but spells.

Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) holds a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design and has had solo exhibitions at One Wall Gallery, Paris, FR and Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles; Marinaro Gallery, New York; Galerie Marguo, Paris; Loft Projects, NY; The Hole, New York; Giovannis Room, Los Angeles; Green Family Art Foundation; Dallas; And Nicodim, Los Angeles, among others.