LYNNE DREXLER

This is the first major presentation of Drexler’s work in Asia, and her second exhibition with White Cube since representation of The Lynne Drexler Archive was announced in November 2023. It follows the inaugural show of her work in Europe at Mason’s Yard, London, in November 2024.

‘Lynne Drexler: The Seventies’ comprises boldly coloured paintings and works on paper made between 1970 and 1978, marking the first time works from this era have ever been exhibited. A significant period within her practice, these works were made during a difficult time in Drexler’s life, during which time she suffered a mental breakdown and experienced psychosomatic colour-blindness.

Born in 1928 near Newport News, Virginia, Drexler was associated with second-generation Abstract Expressionists. She was visibly influenced by Impressionism, Fauvism and Pointillism, art historical movements that reflect her love of classical music and nature.

Drexler shared the fate of many female artists of the post-war era, who were overshadowed by their male peers and counterparts and are only now being reintegrated into the annals of art history. Although she studied under Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, she remained on the periphery of the art world while her husband, the painter John Hultberg, accrued comparable success and fame.

Following two extended sojourns to Europe in the early 1950s, Drexler made the pivotal decision to move to New York in 1955 and became engaged in the city’s vibrant and intellectual art scene. There, over the next decade, she would produce exemplary works of art that were equally formal explorations of colour, form and spatial tension.

By the mid- to late-1960s, with the popularity of Abstract Expressionism in decline, Drexler’s own work had matured into a distinctive, lyrical style of abstract painting, one inspired by the surrounding landscape of her summer home on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine.

After being hospitalised due to her breakdown in 1970, Drexler recuperated by watching matinee shows at the Metropolitan Opera where she would draw while listening to performances including The Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner. She also greatly admired Wassily Kandinsky and his dictum that visual abstraction is akin to musical notation, and the compositions she created during this period were the closest she came to being non-representational in her practice.

Drexler separated from Hultberg in 1983 and settled permanently on Monhegan Island, where her art began to further incorporate elements of the rugged coastal scenery. Though mostly still undiscovered, in the final two decades of her life the artist became locally renowned by exhibiting in galleries around her home and the nearby mainland.

‘Lynne Drexler: The Seventies’ celebrates the legacy of an artist who, despite the shifting currents of the art world, never wavered in her desire to create. The exhibition is on view at White Cube Hong Kong from 26 March until 17 May 2025.

In 2026, a travelling retrospective of Drexler’s work will originate at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Virginia, US, a university museum affiliated with the College of William & Mary where the artist took night classes prior to moving to New York to study with Hans Hofmann.