Palm Springs, CA
In celebration of Fall Modernism Week, The Shops at Thirteen Forty Five are pleased to present MODERNISM – A Solo Exhibition of watercolor paintings – by Jay Samit, opening with a reception for the artist on Saturday, October 17, 4-6pm at The Shops at Thirteen Forty Five on Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs.
Prior to breaking into the art world with his 2020 solo show America Disrupted at the Richard Taittinger Gallery in New York, Jay Samit was known primarily as an internationally best-selling author and technologist who is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on disruption and innovation whose books have been published in over a dozen languages around the world. Having spent a career creating innovative technologies to bring art, music, and video to billions on the Internet, Samit’s art is heavily influenced by the impact disruption has on humans and our institutions. The artist has been called “a digital media pioneer” by the Wall Street Journal and “guru for the entire industry” by Variety— Jay Samit has spent four decades at the intersection of art, technology, and cultural transformation.
MODERNISM brings together a body of watercolor paintings that apply Samit’s signature geometric, cubist-influenced style to images both iconic and intimate. Each painting takes a subject the viewer already knows and shatters it into a new geometry of color, asking the viewer to look again at what they thought they understood.
The exhibition’s large centerpiece work, The Longest Afternoon, depicts two figures poolside at a mid-century Palm Springs architectural masterpiece. Rendered in Samit’s explosive chromatic geometry, the painting transforms the familiar postcard of California leisure into something at once celebratory and unsettling — a meditation on beauty, impermanence, and what we do with our most golden hours.
“This collection of watercolor paintings reinterprets the familiar imagery from half a century ago as a reflection of what our lives have become (and what we have lost along the way),” says Samit. Color and geometry are how I process what language can’t quite reach. The fractured planes in my work aren’t a stylistic choice so much as an honest admission: life is complicated and doesn’t resolve into clean lines.”
Curator James Bacchi represents Jay Samit at JAMES BACCHI CONTEMPORARY. “Art Writer Michael Davis introduced me to Jay Samit’s paintings a few years ago. I was beyond impressed by the artist’s understanding and control of his medium. My intent with the paintings I selected for this exhibition is to invite the viewer to visually transport from Modernism to the new contemporary. Samit’s work is a reminder that watercolor, in the hands of a master, can be among the most expressive and intellectually engaging of all painting mediums.”
Samit’s artistic practice spans decades and has been exhibited across the United States. His paintings are held in private collections internationally. MODERNISM represents the most comprehensive public presentation of his work in California and marks a rare opportunity to encounter the full range of his visual imagination alongside his written work.
The exhibition will coincide with a book signing of Samit’s newest title, The Second Act Advantage, his guide to reinvention, purpose, and leveraging a lifetime of experience in the age of artificial intelligence — themes that run directly through the paintings on the walls.
The exhibition runs through November 30, 2026, at The Shops at Thirteen Forty, 1345 N. Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, California. Viewing Hours are every day, 10-6.