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拍品專文
Held in the same private collection since 1983, Blown Pink (1966) is an extraordinary example of Lynne Drexler’s defining mode of abstract expression. In a swirling kaleidoscope of brushwork, the canvas is intricately textured with grooved impasto stipples, spotted daubs, and flat geometric planes of colour. Abstracted to a complex tessellation of shape and colour, the work appears bejewelled with amethyst and emerald, cut through with a whirlwind of pink and lilac motion. Born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928, Drexler moved to New York in 1956 to pursue fine art, studying under first-generation Abstract Expressionist titans Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. Deeply influenced by this early formal training—shared by the likes of Lee Krasner who had studied at Hofmann’s school two decades prior—Drexler’s work is charged with an emotive gestural language. Informed by his ‘push-pull’ theories of pictorial depth among a myriad of other influences—opera, the natural world, and Post-Impressionism—her abstraction is distinguished from that of her New York School contemporaries, deriving from her uniquely sensorial experience of the world.
Relishing in pink, fuchsia, and magenta pigments, Drexler renders an extraordinary patchwork of colour in which organic forms unfurl, glimmer and bloom like peonies. This vibrant patterning of line pays homage to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, at once recalling Van Gogh’s densely clustered bouquets and blossoms, and the profusions of pale pink tutus in the canvases of Edgar Degas. Drexler painted her first landscape scene at the age of eight, and often used landscapes and still lifes as the starting point for her abstract compositions. Blown Pink was painted after a period of extensive travel through California, Hawaii, and Mexico in the mid-1960s, and regular summers spent on Monhegan Island. Its vivid technicolour speaks to the artist’s memories of sunny climes and exotic flora. By the end of the 1960s, the heyday of post-war abstraction, Drexler had carved out her own, bold language of expression: her work feels elemental, almost fragrant and windswept.
Settling back in New York after her travels, Drexler moved in to the Chelsea Hotel, where she resided for six years before relocating to Soho, and later to Monhegan Island in 1983. It was while living at the iconic 222 West 23rd Street residence—locus for those on the New York arts scene such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jack Kerouac and Robert Mapplethorpe—that Drexler would immerse herself in classical music. Raised in a musical home, she was a lifelong lover of opera, admiring the works of Wagner, Strauss and Tchaikovsky. She would go to the opera often multiple times a week, venturing Midtown to symphony performances at Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera with her sketchpad in hand. Translating sound to line and colour, Drexler reflected: ‘It was just the soaring … the gloriousness of the music’ (L. Drexler quoted in The Art of Lynne Mapp Drexler, exh. cat. Jody Klotz Fine Art, Abilene 2021, p. 4). The present work is distinctly sonorous: form seems to reverberate, ring and chime triumphantly. Recognised only posthumously for her sensorial works, today Drexler is widely celebrated for her exhilarating contributions to post-war American abstraction.
Relishing in pink, fuchsia, and magenta pigments, Drexler renders an extraordinary patchwork of colour in which organic forms unfurl, glimmer and bloom like peonies. This vibrant patterning of line pays homage to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, at once recalling Van Gogh’s densely clustered bouquets and blossoms, and the profusions of pale pink tutus in the canvases of Edgar Degas. Drexler painted her first landscape scene at the age of eight, and often used landscapes and still lifes as the starting point for her abstract compositions. Blown Pink was painted after a period of extensive travel through California, Hawaii, and Mexico in the mid-1960s, and regular summers spent on Monhegan Island. Its vivid technicolour speaks to the artist’s memories of sunny climes and exotic flora. By the end of the 1960s, the heyday of post-war abstraction, Drexler had carved out her own, bold language of expression: her work feels elemental, almost fragrant and windswept.
Settling back in New York after her travels, Drexler moved in to the Chelsea Hotel, where she resided for six years before relocating to Soho, and later to Monhegan Island in 1983. It was while living at the iconic 222 West 23rd Street residence—locus for those on the New York arts scene such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jack Kerouac and Robert Mapplethorpe—that Drexler would immerse herself in classical music. Raised in a musical home, she was a lifelong lover of opera, admiring the works of Wagner, Strauss and Tchaikovsky. She would go to the opera often multiple times a week, venturing Midtown to symphony performances at Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera with her sketchpad in hand. Translating sound to line and colour, Drexler reflected: ‘It was just the soaring … the gloriousness of the music’ (L. Drexler quoted in The Art of Lynne Mapp Drexler, exh. cat. Jody Klotz Fine Art, Abilene 2021, p. 4). The present work is distinctly sonorous: form seems to reverberate, ring and chime triumphantly. Recognised only posthumously for her sensorial works, today Drexler is widely celebrated for her exhilarating contributions to post-war American abstraction.