04/27/2026
Rosalyn Drexler, (1926-2025)
Untitled, n.d.
black and white lithograph ed. of 150
collection of Rockford Art Museum
gift of Dr. Samuel Mandel
Part of the original generation of American Pop artists, Drexler began using commercial imagery in her paintings in 1961—the same year as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In her work, Drexler appropriated images from magazines, newspapers, and movie posters, weaving together the prosaic and the iconic. She painted over her collaged images with bright pigments, eliminating the visual trace of the underlying, mechanically reproduced source material.
Graphically intense and thematically dark, Drexler’s artworks channel the sinister undercurrents of American life, summoning themes of sexuality, fame, and violence. In her work, she presented a farrago of tabloids, history, and social issues presented in the vernacular of American 1940s Film Noir and French Nouvelle Vague. Her paintings depicted infinite admixtures of brutality, desire, pathos, power, desolation and playfulness, reflecting her Shakespearian taste for the variety and range of human qualities. Drexler’s imagery was complex and more difficult to immediately recall than that of her contemporaries: her paintings are iconic in incident as well as image.
In addition to her work as a visual artist, Drexler was also an accomplished novelist and playwright. She published her first play in 1963 and her first novel in 1965. She was the recipient of three Obie Awards, as well as an Emmy Award for her work on Lily Tomlin’s television special Lily (co-written with Richard Pryor). Garth Greenan Gallery
Untitled is now on view in Funderburg gallery.
