SoHo, New York
Rosalyn Drexler
My Life Has a Life of Its Own
Garth GreenanTo inaugurate its new space at 25 Greene Street in SoHo, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present Rosalyn Drexler: My Life Has a Life of Its Own, a major exhibition dedicated to the Bronx-born artist. Curated by Fiona Laugharn, the show is the fifth presentation of Drexler’s work with the gallery, and her first exhibition since her death last year at the age of 98. The exhibition offers a detailed overview of Drexler’s landmark Pop work of the 1960s. Featuring private and institutional loans, the show reunites several important works and series from this generative decade. To augment these iconic paintings, the show also presents a selection of never-before-seen drawings, objects, source imagery, and journals. These materials—uncovered through newly conducted archival research—provide, for the first time, a full picture of Drexler’s creative activities, tracing the depth and complexity of her sui generis approach to the appropriated image. Organized into three sections, the show provides fresh insights into Drexler’s process and themes. “The Image” features Drexler’s early freehand drawings and paintings paired with newly discovered source material, laying out Drexler’s signature process of direct citation via overpainted collage. “Image and Text” examines the role of the written word in Drexler’s work, displaying her iconic text-based paintings alongside the notebooks and sketchbooks that were the engine of her creative activity as an artist and an award-winning writer. Finally, “Return to Image” highlights the ways in which Drexler's affinity for specific motifs led her to iterate imagery across decades. In the process, she transformed her own artistic history—her own life—into her most vital source material. Acting on intuition and using her immediate environment as material, Drexler obsessively collected images, objects, and everyday ephemera. The artworks and materials gathered here are a tribute to the artist’s voracious creativity: revealing the subjects that caught her eye, her artistic process, and her singular perspective on the turbulent culture of the postwar era. Coinciding with the exhibition, designer Rachel Comey will debut a collection at New York Fashion Week inspired by Drexler’s life and work. In addition, Hagfish books will reissue Drexler’s 1974 novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, following the independent press’s critically celebrated release of Drexler’s To Smithereens (1972) in 2025. In October, Anthology Film Archives has programmed an evening devoted to Drexler’s life, with screenings of the 1975 short documentary Who Does She Think She Is? and select home movies shot by Drexler with her husband, Sherman. Finally, the gallery will host a panel discussion dedicated to Drexler’s life and legacy. At Independent 20th Century, the gallery will display a specially curated presentation of the artist’s work. A publication—with essays by Fiona Laugharn, Robert C. Baker, Sid Sachs, and Alex Da Corte—will accompany the exhibition. Rosalyn Drexler (1926–2025) was born in the Bronx, New York. Part of the original generation of American Pop artists, Drexler began appropriating commercial imagery in the early 1960s—at the same time as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Only recently, however, has she received critical recognition for this achievement. Graphically intense and thematically dark, Drexler’s artworks channel the sinister undercurrents of American life, summoning themes of sexuality, fame, and violence.