"As Baudelaire says, ‘the beautiful is always strange,’ by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising.” —Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon 
 

Married Los Angeles-based artists, Robert Russell and Lisa Edelstein share an intimate orbit, but they are not an artist duo; instead, their works share the room in much the same way as they do themselves—as two distinct personalities coming close, moving apart, and always engrossed in conversation across a table laid with candles, food, grief, memory, humor, and grace.

When Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” he spoke of a sanctuary built not out of brick and mortar, but out of care and attention—a sacred clearing carved out and set aside from the rush of daily life. Artists Robert Russell and Lisa Edelstein have taken that poetically literal idea and chronicled its atmospheres, accoutrements, and more secular artifacts and observances in a thoughtful pairing of their stylistically differing but spiritually aligned creative practices in the Skirball exhibition A Palace in Time.

Edelstein’s paintings proceed from a place of exuberant, quirky humanity. Working exclusively from extended-family photo albums to maintain a personal connection to her subjects, she paints scenes, portraits, and vignettes capturing multi-generational gatherings overflowing with floral arrangements, wine glasses, silver pitchers, and the familiar, overlapping chorus of a family talking all at once. Her lavish sense of color and pattern amplifies the social energy of her scenes, even as her empathetic portraits create moments of stillness within them. Faithful to the awkward cropping of her vernacular sources, the vibrant profusion of her style is guided by a sharp, intuitive editorial eye and a deeply ingrained sense of passionate authenticity perhaps earned in her lauded career as an actor and director. She invites viewers to join the dinners, weddings, and family vacations of strangers, only for us to instantly feel at home. As Edelstein notes, the process is about, “opening a door into another person’s family while not losing the mirror that holds up to your own.”

Russell for his part claims himself to be, “essentially a conceptual painter,” as shaped by the rigorous (and ironically, famously antagonistic toward narrative/ symbolist painting) methodological framework of his CalArts education. But conceptualism has rarely had such a classically technique-driven, Renaissance-inflected champion—not one as obsessed with the shadow work of collective truth and accountability. As Russell takes allegedly ordinary domestic and ritual objects—Kiddush cups, yahrzeit candles, porcelain creamers—and strips them of immediate functionality, he highlights the collision of holiness and household, and the way in which diasporic populations invest their whole selves in the smallest objects, consecrating them as physical containers that carry the literal residue of ancestral touch and in their continued existence speak to the endurance of their peoples.

In fact, Russell speaks with deep personal affection of the plurality of history-coded domestic heirlooms, such as the three individual brass candlesticks sitting on his own Shabbat table at home—split generations ago by a great-great-grandmother who handed down singles instead of pairs to her three daughters. His canvases make such synecdochal objects saved from fire, carried across borders, and stashed away in drawers into heroes—but as Russell reflects, “I sometimes think of those objects like stand-ins for the viewers of Lisa’s work in a funny way. They’re like witnesses to this chaos. The containers. They hold that,” and sometimes echo the objects inside her paintings as well.

As part of preparing for the exhibition, the two perused Skirball’s archives and holdings. Tucked away in the collection, she discovered a tiny, damaged black-andwhite photograph of a Skirball board member from the 1950s. That small, rescued fragment became Alfred and the Red Shoe, a painting that quietly bridges the distance between institutional history, archival preservation, and living bloodlines. In this process, both artists noted that the museum’s historical holdings were predominantly weighted toward Ashkenazic history—but also noted Skirball’s broad institutional efforts to expand and deepen its representation of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cultures. This contextual thread surfaces around specific cultural artifacts and imagery examined during the project—such as a Hamsa symbol (with its shared Sephardic and Arab origins) and Robert’s incorporation of a figurative Yemenite Passover scene—tying the visual work back into a diverse tapestry of traditions beyond an Ashkenormative baseline.

In a cultural moment where presenting the texture of Jewish life can feel fraught, both painters choose to lean into the radical, affirmative power of beauty and presence. Russell’s conceptual background taught him that beauty can function as a profound invitation to a safe place for challenging conversations. By drawing viewers in through a hyper-seductive, luminous painting style, he encourages them to linger—and the longer you stand before what appears to be a quiet study of a cream pitcher or a candle, the more the work opens up, revealing its deeper significance and illuminating lesser-known histories. Edelstein takes a similar tack, reeling viewers in with the infectious joy of her scenes, only to land on a place of inclusive, resonant self-awareness—in the drawer full of embroidered linens no one needs but everyone feels compelled to guard, and the stubborn, poignant human impulse to gather around a table, pour a drink, and light a candle against the dark.

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Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown Los Angeles. She is the editor and co-founder of 13ThingsLA on Substack, and a contributor to LA Times, Alta Journal, Artbound/PBS SoCal, Music Connection, New Art Examiner, and other culture publications, and was the longtime Arts Editor at LA Weekly. She is the recipient of the Rabkin Art Writers Prize and the LA Press Club Critic of the Year award.