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LYNNE DREXLER (American, 1928-1999) Untitled, 1959, Mixed media on paper, 14” x 16 3/4”

LYNNE DREXLER (American, 1928-1999), Untitled, 1959, Mixed media on paper, 14” x 17”

LYNNE DREXLER, Tropical Still, 1963, Oil on canvas, 18” x 14”

Lynne Mapp Drexler

Biography

Lynne Mapp Drexler was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928. Drexler began her study of art as a child, painting landscapes by age eight. In the
late 1950s, after attending the College of William and Mary in Virginia, she immersed herself in Abstract Expressionism, studying with Hans Hofmann in both his New York and Provincetown schools. From there she went on to graduate
school at Hunter College in New York City with Robert Motherwell. In the early works Drexler focused on color and composition, eventually reconciling her two interests—landscape and abstraction—in her late work of the 1980s and ‘90s.

But it was in the 1950s that she set her foundation—a synthesis of Post-Impressionist landscape painting and post-war painterly abstraction. The results are something not familiar to most students of the period and her crisp, colorful brushwork allows the artist to sing with a completely original voice. Classical music remained an important part of her art. When she lived in New York she regularly attended concerts at Carnegie Hall where she would make sketches while she was in the audience. Her vibrant surfaces are both complex and painterly but with a flatness akin to something found in the background of a Gustav Klimt work. Drexler lived the last 16 years of her life on Monhegan Island with her husband, the painter John Hultberg, she passed away in 1999.

Drexler exhibited extensively throughout her life at venues such as Tanager Gallery, Esther Robles Gallery and Westerly Gallery. She is slated for upcoming shows at the Monhegan Museum and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Monhegan Museum, Farnsworth Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum among others.

 

Selected Solo Shows:
1961 Tanager Gallery, NYC
1965 Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles
1967 Nuuana Valley Gallery, Honolulu, HA|
1970,71,73,75 Alonzo Gallery, NYC 1983 Aldona Gobuzas Gallery, NYC
1983 Veydras Ltd, NYC
1984 Middlesex Community College, Piscataway, NJ
1984 St. John’s University, Staten Island, NY
1989 Gallery 127, Portland, ME-June-July
1989 Judith Leighton Gallery, Blue Hill ME
1989 Gallery 6, Portland, ME
1998 Lupine Gallery, Monhegan, ME
2003 Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston Maine
other gallery shows in Maine in 2005, 2006, 2007
1963 2 Person Show: Galleria, San Miguel Allende, Mexico (a
hand written bio says 1962)
1987 3 Person Show Anita Shapulsky Gallery, NYC
1992 2 Person Show The Art Gallery at 6 Deering Street,
Portland, Maine (April 1992)

Selected Collections
Best Company, Richmond, VA
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Ciba-GeigyFarnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME
Martha Jackson Collection
Monhegan Museum, Monhegan Is. ME
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art (2 lithographs in Rosenwald
Collection)
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Prentice-Hall Collection, NY
Queens Museum for Art Education, NY
Reynolds Metal
Tamarind Lithographs University of New Mexico