debra.drexlerfineart@gmail.com
BIOGRAPhY/Statement
Debra Drexler is an American painter, installation artist, curator and professor based in New York.
My large-scale acrylic and oil paintings engage in a feminist conversation with the history of action painting. They are informed both by participating in the contemporary resurgence of abstraction coming out of New York, and by living in the Post Colonial Pacific for over three decades, abstractly referencing the delicate, endangered eco system of Hawai’i. My selective color palette references the genderization of color; my brushstrokes reference the “heroic” marks associated with Action Painting, and feminize them. My work is driven by an athletic painting process, working back and forth between the floor and the wall. Through powerful strokes of pinks, lilacs, and lavenders, the works express a muscular femininity and claim space as an act of empowerment.
Debra Drexler has worked in both New York and Oahu, and her work is informed by her unique bi-coastal experience. . In 2022, her work appeared in two distinct two-person exhibitions in New York with the icon of American abstraction, Helen Frankenthaler (Flirt: Helen Frankenthaler and Debra Drexler at Anne Kendall Richards Gallery and ART SHE SAYS salon). AKR followed this up with Pink Muse an exhibit of Drexler and Frankenthaler in 2023. Her 2021 exhibit Abstraction X3 at Maui Arts and Cultural Center celebrated the legacy of three established painters who were working in the Hawaiian Islands. She has participated in over thirty solo and over 100 group exhibitions in national and international venues and is represented by Front Room Gallery in New York. Debra Drexler was a Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Hawai’i from 1992 to 2025 and was the Interim Director of the Museum and Galleries from 2023 to 2025.
Recent solo exhibits in and around New York include: Front Room Gallery 2021 Van Der Plas Gallery (2015, 2017, 2018), The Majestic Theater curated by The Dorado Project in Jersey City, White Box-The Annex, Pool Art Fair, Chelsea Hotel Blue Mountain Gallery, HP Garcia Gallery and Java Studios Gallery. In addition, Drexler has exhibited in group exhibitions in New York including Front Room Gallery, The Drawing Center, Denise Bibro Gallery, Exit Art, Art Finance Partners, and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, and Sideshow Gallery. In a recent review of a two-person exhibition at Gallery Gary Giordano (Whitehot Magazine, 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."
Drexler’s installation, Gauguin’s Zombie, which traveled from the Honolulu Museum (2002) to Maui Arts and Culture Center (2003) to White Box-The Annex, New York (2005), continues to be cited in academic publications such as The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion and Living Death (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and Gauguin’s Challenge: New Perspectives After Postmodernism, (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has an MFA from Southern Illinois University and attended Northwestern University, San Francisco Art Institute and Webster University as an undergraduate.
[1] Goodman, Jonathan, “’Galkyd, Galkyd’” Presents the Best of Today’s Abstraction,” Whitehot Magazine, August 2017. https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/presents-best-today-s-abstraction/3717
