White Cube is pleased to announce representation of The Lynne Drexler Archive. The gallery will be working with the late-artist’s archive globally, outside of the US.
White Cube will present solo exhibitions of Lynne Drexler’s paintings in November 2024, at Mason’s Yard in London and Hong Kong, highlighting different bodies of work from the artist’s richly varied career. Prior to these two shows, a rare, large-scale 1968 painting, titled Maui Melody, will be on view this December, at White Cube’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Born in 1928 near Newport News, Virginia, Drexler was affiliated with the second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Her vividly chromatic compositions reflect a breadth of stylistic influences, merging Impressionism, Fauvism and Pointillism and revealing the artist’s appreciation for classical music and nature. Despite being a student first of Hans Hofmann and later Robert Motherwell, she remained on the periphery of the mainstream art canon throughout her career – eclipsed, in part, by her more lauded male counterparts, including her older, and already established husband, the painter John Hultberg – Drexler shared the fate of many female artists of the post-war era whose legacies are now being integrated into the annals of art history.
After a pivotal move to New York in the mid-1950s, Drexler immersed herself in the city's vibrant art scene where a new vanguard of Abstract Expressionists was reshaping the cultural sphere. Her works from this period, characterised by technical explorations of colour, form and spatial tension, are eminently of their time and emblematic of the experimental mid-century zeitgeist.
In 1983, Drexler made a permanent move to her remote summer home on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, where she remained until her death in 1999. The move marked a creative transition for Drexler, resulting in a shift towards a visual language that welcomed trace elements of the island’s rugged setting, including the coastal landscape and flora of the region.
An artist who, despite the shifting currents of the art world, never ceased to create, Drexler found local renown exhibiting in galleries on the island and nearby mainland in the last two decades of her life.
Alongside White Cube’s global representation of the artist, The Lynne Drexler Archive is represented in the US by Berry Campbell.
Sukanya Rajaratnam, Global Director of Strategic Market Initiatives, White Cube, said: ‘It is very exciting for White Cube to have the opportunity to promote the legacy of Lynne Drexler on the international stage. The artist’s early paintings from the sixties have already garnered much attention, however there are many subsequent bodies of work that are equally as innovative and have yet to be presented to global audiences in a thoughtful and rigorous way. As part of my ongoing work with the artist, I am delighted to continue collaborating closely with Michael Rancourt and our colleagues at Berry Campbell.’
Michael Rancourt, Director, The Lynne Drexler Archive, said: ‘I am thrilled to be partnering with White Cube as our global gallery representative. After successful collaboration with Sukanya Rajaratnam on previous projects, I feel privileged to join her in this new endeavour with White Cube to expand the opportunities for Lynne Drexler in the global marketplace. We look forward to working with White Cube to secure Drexler’s position in the canon of 20th-century American art.’
