Rosalyn Drexler Featured in the Village Voice
December 15, 2017
The vibe throughout 2017 — white supremacists are “fine” people, the top 5 percent need tax cuts financed by the bottom 95 percent, Vladimir Putin is a great guy — has been pretty ugly.
Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard Reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail
October 2017
A woman falls from heights unknown. We see her from below. She wears a blue bikini, marked by red hands on her breasts and red hearts on her pubis. Behind her in the distance, neon rays the color of sunset hours burst forth at dynamic angles into the black nothingness that surrounds them. Within these rays, which seem to emanate from the falling figure, black squares in repetitive patterns, shaped by subtle forms, morph into the shape of buildings and mountains. The woman's arms are stretched out, bracing for impact. She is alone, isolated, in this eternal descent. This is a death fall in the golden hour of earthly beauty.
Rosalyn Drexler Featured in Frieze
October 1, 2017
I grew up in the Bronx, not far from Van Cortlandt Park, which is so big it felt like its own country then. I didn’t go into Manhattan often until I attended the High School of Music and Art, years later, though I remember visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my father and seeing a Jean-Simon Chardin painting of a peach, which impressed me because it looked so juicy, so perfect. That was something to aspire to – a representation of a peach so real it made you feel like you were part of the painting. Most of the artworks I saw in those days were reproductions, though; a local paper had a special offer on posters for its subscribers, at 25 cents each, so I bought a J.M.W. Turner seascape for my bedroom wall. The same newspaper offered book deals, so I built up a library – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain. We also had some strange books, like The Cardinal’s Mistress (1908) by Benito Mussolini. I would paint and draw when I was sick in bed, because my mother would bring me all sorts of colouring books and crayons to pass the time. I loved the bold outlines and bright colours of those books. The Crayolas smelled like spring to me.
Rosalyn Drexler Featured on Artnet
September 27, 2017
“I cannot just do nothing,” said Rosalyn Drexler. At 90 years old, the acclaimed artist, novelist, and playwright is as busy as ever, having just opened a show at Garth Greenan in New York, her second since joining the Chelsea gallery in 2015.
Rosalyn Drexler Featured on Broadway World
September 19, 2017
Garth Greenan Gallery has announced a special one-night-only reading of Sweet Tooth, a play by Rosalyn Drexler, directed by Dustin Wills, as part of the ongoing exhibition Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard.
Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard Reviewed on Time Out
September 11, 2017
Once a forgotten figure of Pop Art, Drexler has seen a major revival of her career in the past several years. This show focuses on her work since 1986.
Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard Reviewed on Hyperallergic
September 10, 2017
Rosalyn Drexler, who is about to turn 91, is an unlikely grande dame of painting, but that is what she is. Her rediscovery began a little over 10 years ago when a mini-survey, Rosalyn Drexler: I Am the Beautiful Stranger, Paintings of the ’60s, Pace/Wildenstein, New York, March 16–April 21, 2007, thoughtfully curated by Arne Glimcher, opened at Pace/Wildenstein to wide acclaim. Here was an artist that the histories of Pop Art, with their focus on male painters, had left out. And yet it was immediately clear that such charged paintings as “Marilyn Pursued by Death” (1963), “Chubby Checker” (1964), and “Is It True What they Say About Dixie” (1966) more than held their own with works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and, frankly, outshone works by Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, and other better known figures. In 2016-17, a traveling retrospective, Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?, which originated at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, co-organized by Katy Siegel and Caitlin Julia Rubin, helped elevate her to the pantheon of important artists associated with Pop Art.
Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard Reviewed on Artnet
September 7, 2017
Rosalyn Drexler, known for her politically charged Pop art, has been exhibiting her artwork since the 1950s. In her new show, Garth Greenan is focusing on the more surreal paintings she’s been making since 1986. Many of the compositions feature menacing, often masked figures, an interchangeable cast of criminals, businessmen, and politicians.
Rosalyn Drexler Featured in the Village Voice
September 6, 2017
A one-woman American Century, Rosalyn Drexler contains multitudes: paintings, novels, plays, essays. She was born Rosalyn Bronznick, in the Bronx, in 1926, three years before the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Great Depression. It is staggering to consider even a minimal list of all that she has witnessed: Hopper, Pollock, Warhol; World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terror; jazz, rock, rap; FDR, JFK, Trump; fascism, feminism, and fascism again.