Debra Drexler for sale on 1stDibs
Debra Drexler is an American painter, installation artist, curator and professor. Her work engages in a feminist conversation with the history of action painting, which is informed both by participating in the contemporary resurgence of abstraction coming out of New York, and by living in the Post Colonial Pacific for close to three decades. She has participated in over thirty solo and over 100 group exhibitions in national and international venues. Debra Drexler is represented by Front Room Gallery in New York.
Recent solo exhibits include: Van Der Plas Gallery, The Majestic Theater curated by The Dorado Project in Jersey City, White Box-The Annex, Pool Art Fair at the Chelsea Hotel, Blue Mountain Gallery, HP Garcia Gallery and Java Studios Gallery. In addition, Drexler has exhibited in group exhibitions in New York including Front Room Gallery, The Drawing Center, Denise Bibro Gallery, Exit Art, Art Finance Partners, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery and Sideshow Gallery. She was a featured artist in Salon Zucher, The 11 Women of Spirit and currently is featured in a three person show, “Abstract x3,” Schaefer International Gallery, Maui Arts and Cultural Center, Kahului, HI.
She maintains studios in Brooklyn, NY and on the island of Oahu in Hawai’i. Debra Drexler's most recent work is highly experimental large-scale abstract painting. In a recent review of a two-person exhibition at Gallery Gary Giordano (Whitehot Magazine) Drexler's work as clearly referencing the long tradition of American abstraction and the established legacy of the New York School. The reviewer, Jonathan Goodman, described the work as a “new non-objectivity” that comes out of the current moment. He states that Drexler's painting “quite accurately describes the spirit of abstract art today, in which painting is struggling to break free of the constraints of time."
Debra Drexler is a Professor at the University of Hawaii, where she is Chair of the Drawing and Painting Area. She has had solo exhibitions in Hawai’i at The Honolulu Museum and Maui Arts and Cultural Center. In October, 2015 she co-curated with Liam Davis New New York at the University of Hawai’i Gallery, a survey examining the resurgence of contemporary abstract painting featuring the work of 30 internationally recognized artists. New New York traveled to The Curator Gallery in Chelsea in 2017. She has also curated exhibits in New York including at The Lab of Rogersmith Arts, as well as in Hawai’i and Australia.
A Close Look at abstract Art
Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.
Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.
Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.
Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.
Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.
Find original abstract paintings, sculptures, prints and other art on 1stDibs.
