Installation view of Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, in collaboration with Berry Campbell Gallery, October 27 - December 17, 2022, © The Estate of Lynne Drexler. Photography by Tom Powel Imaging.
William Corwin reviews Lynne Drexler: The First Decade for The Brooklyn Rail.
Corwin writes, "Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, simultaneously at both Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Galleries, we come across a voracious and novel form of late Abstract Expressionism. It’s a path that runs parallel to color-field painting, and in playing with discreet nodes of color owes as much to Klimt, van Gogh, and Seurat, as it does to Drexler’s mentor and teacher, Hans Hofmann. The paintings in these two exhibitions test out how best to manipulate the viewer’s response to associations of almost-pixelated color units, singular forms which attain a mosaic-like quality: working together but retaining their independence. This causes almost as much visual agita as it creates harmonic compositions. But Drexler enjoys this game, pushing us into musical associations, as with the fiery and seething Gotterdammerung (1959), which displays her obsession with Wagner; or reminding us of the luminaries of late nineteenth/early twentieth century painting. The paintings are slyly referential, and at times almost charts or repositories of leitmotifs, gorgeous but slightly too practiced. It is at the moments when the gestures themselves begin to get out of hand that we begin to really enjoy Drexler’s chaotic energy."