Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard

About

The exhibition is the first presentation of Drexler’s work since her recent retrospective at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (2016; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2016–2017; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, 2017). Eleven of the artist’s bold, psychologically complex paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of never before seen source material.

The show will focus on Drexler’s work since 1986, a remarkably prolific yet underappreciated period in the artist’s oeuvre. In these paintings, while favorite themes from her sixties repertoire persist—violent transactions, dubious business, murders, and sex—her subjects/compositions are more surreal and open-ended. Frequently, the figures wear masks or face away from the viewer. For Drexler, masking underlines the interchangeability of her cast of criminals, businessmen, and politicians, and further dramatizes their menace. Artists, whether friends (such as Andy Warhol) or not (such as Jean-Michel Basquiat), and artworks by herself and others, also figure into these paintings, echoing the intensification during the 1980s of Drexler’s reflexive preoccupation with the art world. In an homage to Henri Rousseau, Sueño Revista (Rosalyn and Sherman in a Rousseau) (1989), Drexler inserts herself and her late husband, the artist Sherman Drexler, into an emulation of The Dream(1910). Replacing Rousseau’s exotic nude with an image of herself bewitched by the music of some magical Shermanesque creature, Drexler celebrates her love and artistic subjectivity as seduced daydreamer.

One of the most significant works in the exhibition, Portrait of the Artist (1989), underlines the importance of both painting and writing to Drexler’s creative persona. It features a masked figure in a painterly frame with brush in hand and a “beanie with an airplane at the top.” The airplane symbolizes the “traveling mind of a writer,” the artist explains. In particular, the mask highlights Drexler’s association with theater; it also points to the hide-and-seek/hide-to-reveal game so fundamental to her work since the sixties, as well as to her lifelong role-playing as both a woman and an artist. Its “useful clothes” effect a potent cross-dressing that echoes the artist’s generous embrace of all kinds of difference, as often revealed in her plays and novels. Despite the red boots and polished nails, the suit and tie render Portrait of the Artist into a desexualizing reprise of Drexler’s earlier, subtly transgressive Self-Portrait (1964). This is one of the artist’s great strengths. For all their luridness, her narratives remain ambiguous. Viewers can speculate about the story, but that is all they can do because the story never fully reveals itself.