Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man

 

men, women, and pulp obsessions

work from 1961 — 2001

 

September 5 - October 20, 2006

 

Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 20, 5 — 8 pm

Readings by Rosalyn Drexler: Wednesday, September 27, 5:30 — 6:30 pm

 

               

                Men and Machines V, 1966 oil over paper collage on canvas, 30" x 50"                                                                Study for Men and Machines I, 1965 acrylic over paper collage on canvas, 18" x 24"

Men confront us in Rosalyn Drexler’s paintings and collages, and they confront themselves. They cross women’s lives. Their look, their obsessions, fantasies, and fears are routed into Drexler’s paintings from the pages of pulp detective novels, tabloid journalism, and from television and gangster B-movies.

While biology may determine sex, culture fashions gender—shaping our views of what it means to be men and women. Society and history, therefore, make the man. But to what ends? Drexler’s paintings reveal the purposes and the fall of man at the end of the twentieth century. They combine Pop Art and geometrical abstraction to frame society’s understanding of itself through the theater of pop-cultural imagery.

 

                      

            Lovers (a.k.a. Am I Faris), 1963 acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 56" x 52"                                       Marilyn Pursued By Death, 1967 acrylic over paper collage on canvas, 50" x 30"

Drexler began her career as a sculptor, with her first solo show in New York City in 1960 at the Rueben Gallery, which also featured the work of Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, and Lucas Samaras. She began experimenting with collage and painting in 1961 (with God Shaves, pictured above) and was one of the first to incorporate enlarged images from popular culture onto the canvas, painting over them to create a hybrid of collage paintings.

Drexler is also an important avant-garde writer and novelist, a three-time Obie Award winning playwright, and an Emmy Award winning TV writer, co-writing a Lily Tomlin Special with Richard Pryor. Rosalyn Drexler is a Renaissance woman, living and working in Newark.

                               

                 God Shaves, 1961 oil over paper collage on canvas, 20" x 24"                                                                      Lear Executive, 1967 acrylic over paper collage on canvas, 30" x 50"

 

Organized by Jorge Daniel Veneciano

Color catalog available with drama by Rosalyn Drexler, and essays by Rhonda Garelick, Michael Kimmel, and Jorge Daniel Veneciano

This program is funded in part by grants from the Cultural Programming Committee, Rutgers-Newark, New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department
of State, TheFeministArtProject, New Brunswick, and by private donors.