Lynne Drexler: The Seventies

The Seventies is a solo exhibition by the American artist and painter Lynne Drexler, which is described as "abstract landscapes” and “paintings and drawings with a landscape feel.” These works respond to the widespread debate about the expressive utility of painting with a paradoxical mentality.

The work is presented through all-over motifs typical of her generation of Color Field painters, often using dense passages of primary or complementary colors. Hovering between landscape, still life, and abstraction, the artist's forms evoke blades of grass, flower heads, fields seen from above, and dappled sunlight filtering through treetops, even as they refuse to explicitly settle into any of these themes, scales, or perspectives. Yet her increasingly abstract focus on relationships of shape, color, and form is less a rejection of the image itself than a desire to capture in paint or crayon an encounter with the world as vibrating energy, rendering vision as sensation and metamorphosis.

If her careful use of complementary hues evokes the Venetian color master Titian, the vibrant swirls of Van Gogh or the dense patterns of Gustav Klimt are also recognizable in her canvases from the 1970s. The conceptual and temporal complexity of her paintings, in which maintaining a sense of place is to simultaneously have the sense of encountering it, of being in it, and of remembering it from a distance, combines the act of looking with the act of conjuring in the mind’s eye. The ability to simultaneously evoke music and stone, geological roots and imagination, embodies the core of Drexler's pictorial research.

Lynne Drexler - << The Seventies>>
Date: 26 Mar – 17 May 2025
Gallery: @whitecube
Address: 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong
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