New Gallery to Open Inaugural Exhibit of Decorated Armenian Artist Rafael Megall’s Work
“Apes of the Garden” by Rafael Megall, 2024. Oil on Canvas. All images copyrighted by Rafael Megall and are courtesy of the artist and Mek Contemporary, LA
GLENDALE – Mek Contemporary will inaugurate its exhibition program this September with “Idols in Bloom,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Rafael Megall.
Opening September 24 and on view through November 6, the exhibition brings together works featuring porcelain figurines, floral forms, and motifs drawn from Armenian visual traditions to consider how memory, inherited imagery, and cultural identity are reshaped over time.The gallery will host an opening reception Thursday, September 24 from 6 to 8 p.m.
At the center of “Idols in Bloom” are decorative porcelain figures associated with Soviet-era domestic interiors. Collected, displayed, and often passed between generations, these familiar objects become, in Megall’s paintings, carriers of personal and collective memory. The artist fragments and recombines their forms, bringing disparate elements together to produce figures that resist restoration to any single original state.
Armenian ornament moves throughout the compositions, connecting and obscuring the figures while shifting between pattern and image. Floral forms introduce a parallel language of growth and impermanence, appearing both within Megall’s larger, densely layered paintings and independently in smaller panel works.
The exhibition’s title reflects the tension at the center of the body of work. For Megall, the idol is not limited to an object of worship, but can describe something made meaningful through memory and attachment. The bloom suggests change, emergence, and continued life. Together, they frame an exhibition concerned with the ways images and cultural forms persist not by remaining fixed, but through their continual transformation.”
“Imperial Blossom,” 2026
“Jade Monkeys,” 2023
His work has been included in exhibitions at Museum Kampa, Prague; Tang Contemporary, Singapore and Bangkok; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Vestfossen; Fondazione Stelline, Milan; and the National Gallery of Armenia, among others. Publications on his work include “Megall: Idols and Icons,” published by Rizzoli in 2022, and “Rafael Megall: Paintings 2009–2015,” published by Skira in 2015.
His honors include the Gold Medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia, the Arshile Gorky Honorable Medal, Lorenzo ii Magnifico Award at the Florence Biennale and the title of Honored Artist of the Republic of Armenia.
Mek Contemporary is a Los Angeles-based gallery founded on the belief that meaningful conversations in art often begin with a singular encounter. The gallery presents contemporary artists working across disciplines and geographies, with particular attention to work that engages memory, migration, displacement, place, identity, and cultural inheritance. Mek is drawn to artists who explore these ideas through distinctive relationships to form, material, and image.
Grounded in close attention to each artist, each body of work, and the conversations their work inspires, the gallery develops focused exhibitions, publications, and sustained relationships with artists, collectors, institutions, and audiences. Through this approach, Mek extends these conversations beyond the exhibition space.
