Debra Drexler

Debra Drexler's most recent work is highly experimental large-scale abstract painting. In a recent review of a two-person exhibition (Whitehot Magazine,[1] 2017) 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."

She frequently uses hot pink, a color with heavily gendered associations. Her hot pink brushstrokes reference the “heroic” marks associated with action painting, and feminize them.

The luminosity and high key saturation in Drexler's work are created through multiple layers of glazing of pigment mixed with polymer and alkyd media. Some of her color choices reference the post-digital experience with its highly saturated synthetic color. The luminosity and saturation also mirror the unique quality of light and the over-the-top, tropical color interactions in Hawaii.

“Gauguin’s Zombie” developed over seven years of research and art making between 1998 and 2005, and was exhibited at Honolulu Museum of Art (2002), Maui Arts and Cultural Center[2] (2003) and Box-The Annex (2005). Based on the premise that Paul Gauguin, French painter and visitor to the South Pacific, has returned to life in a fictional exhibition in a fictional museum, this installation explores the complex dynamics between the past and present, the influence of colonialism and cultural identity, and the traditions of the Western and non-Western worlds. The installation included large-scale paintings, woodcarvings, a thatched hut, and fabricated writings such as emails, faxes, press releases, journal entries, and artist's statements.

In The Transatlantic Zombie (Rutgers, 2015) Sarah Juliet Lauro, states "Drexler's reworkings of Gauguin's painting are a zombie project as well as a project representing the zombie: these are essentially the dead works of Gauguin made strange and given new life, but they definitively refashioned as a critique of Gauguin's work, and its, I would say starkly uncritical chronicle of empire."[3][4]

In “Debra Drexler: Resuscitating Gauguin”[5] in NY Arts Magazine (May/June 2005), Molly Kleiman states, “The installation, an exercise in post-colonial appropriations and feminist inversions, is playful and subversive. She explores themes obliquely and cleverly, forcing no brittle lessons about the conflicts of post-colonial, no stubborn treatise on the poisonous male gaze. She doesn’t need to.”

In Gauguin's Challenge: New Perspectives after Modernism[6] edited by Norma Broude (Bloomsbury, 2018), Heather Waldroup writes, “The themes of the exhibition are wide-ranging, including a critique of ethnographic museums and, in particular, their display of human remains; the commercialization of the museum through gift show sales; and the continued validity of modernism in contemporary art worlds (Drexler is, primarily an abstract painter).”

Between 2007-2010, Drexler worked on a series in which the imagery became more abstract, leading her to her current body of abstraction. In a review of Shadow Play at HP Garcia Gallery, Michael Carter wrote in A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine[7] (June 25, 2010), ” Like the most powerful abstract paintings of the last century, reproductions can only provide a crude chart of her stratagem; the luminosity of the oils themselves, along with their deft application can really only be truly appreciated in person. These are rare works, which show an artist struggling with and for the spirit.”