Mel Odom’s work is right out of Roman and Greek mythology. His accomplishment is so locked into our memories of Beauties, Beasts, tables that walk on claw- balled feet, and candelabra held up by bodiless hands that extinguish their flames when some dark wind blows.

– Ray Bradbury

Sea View is pleased to present DREAMS FOR SALE, the solo exhibition debut of New York-based artist Mel Odom (b. 1950, Richmond,VA) in Los Angeles.

After moving to New York City in 1975, Mel Odom became immersed in a Downtown cultural milieu defined by nightlife, performance, publishing, and queer culture– conditions that would shape his sustained pursuit of beauty amidst the backdrop of loss, reinvention, hope, and disease.

Early in his career, Odom built a name for himself through commercial drawings for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Time, Viva, and Blueboy, and illustrating for writers such as Ray Bradbury, Edmund White, Tom Robbins, Ruth Rendell and Roald Dahl. In 1995, shortly before Odom’s boyfriend, Gene Bagnato, passed away from AIDS, Odom created the collectible fashion doll, Gene Marshall– whose elaborate world of old Hollywood nostalgia reflected not only Odom’s interest in fantasy and identity construction, but also his desire to commemorate those he lost through fictional retellings. Like his drawings and paintings, the Gene Marshall narrative was elaborate and emotionally complex, assembling a complete cinematic universe of rivals, lovers, costumes, and lore. “Gene was a huge gift to me not just in a financial or creative sense, it gave me something beautiful to focus on when I lost Gene,” Odom recalls.

Although Odom has been widely celebrated for his commercial work and collectible design, his art practice has increasingly been understood for its singular contribution to queer image-making and storytelling in contemporary art. Working across graphite, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and oil, Odom has crafted a distinct visual universe through exceptionally precise drawings and paintings which combine a baroque sensuality with a poignant meditation on mortality.

Odom belongs to a unique generation of gay men that experienced the halcyon decade of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS New York City. This glittering epoch, and the devastation of what came next, manages to coexist within Odom’s spectral portraits of larger-than-life individuals. Referencing everything from Aubrey Beardsley, old Hollywood cinema, Art Deco, to fashion illustration, Odom has cultivated an aesthetic that resists the dominant visual codes of the masculine and homoerotic that are associated with gay representation, most notably by Tom of Finland or Mike Kuchar. Instead, his work embraces fragility, romance, artifice and ambiguity as anchors of emotional truth.

DREAMS FOR SALE presents a unique opportunity for viewers to engage with drawings and paintings spanning the mid-1970s through the present– a historical register of work which is at once deeply personal, unabashed in its depiction of beauty, simultaneously humorous and melancholic, and wholly valorized as fine art.

Mel Odom has been recognized with multiple honors from the Society of Illustrators. Recent solo exhibitions include Blind Tongue, David Lewis, New York, NY (2023) and Gorgeous, Daniel Cooney, New York, NY (2019). Recent group exhibitions include L'âge du trait, Sans Titre, Paris, FR (2026); Cupid’s Bow, curated by Milano Chow, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2023) Works on Paper: 100 Years, Amanita, New York, NY (2023), Neo Rising, Polansky Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2022) and Idols of Perversity, Bellwether, Brooklyn, NY (2005). His drawings have been published in the monographs First Eyes (1982), Dreamer (1984), and Mel Odom: Gorgeous! (2024). Odom has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Sans Titre, Paris, FR (2026).