Rosalyn Drexler’s Art Shines at New York’s Garth Greenan Gallery and Rachel Comey’s Runway Show

The late Rosalyn Drexler set her figures against solid backgrounds that have an oddly familiar quality typical of first-generation Pop art. They appear so familiar because she pulled these figures from print media and movie posters, and then made her own via her distinct use of color. Still today, some six decades later, Drexler’s paintings still feel fresh and new.

They are currently the subject of a solo show, titled “My Life Has a Life of Its Own” that inaugurates one of Garth Greenan Gallery’s two new downtown Manhattan locations, on Greene Street just above Canal Street. On view through October 24, the show presents nearly 50 paintings and drawings made between 1960, the year before Drexler began working with commercial imagery, and 1969, around when she stopped painting as much and turned her attention to playwriting for the next decade. Several of the works on view were included in her second solo show, at Kornblee Gallery in 1964.

“My Life Has a Life of Its Own” takes its name from an entry in one Drexler’s notebooks. “In the journal, she talks about this quote, and she’s like, maybe one day I’ll figure out what it means,” Fiona Laugharn, the exhibition’s curator, told me.

The exhibition is divided into three sections—“The Image,” “Image & Text,” and “Return to Image”—that track with three vitrines in the show that are filled with materials from Drexler’s archive. “I wanted them to echo that experience of going through the archive, to have it be very dense,” Laugharn said. “They almost as if they’re collages too.”

In the center vitrine are about a dozen newspaper clippings, including “Rothschild heir a suicide in Paris,” which Drexler copied into a notebook as “The young Rothschild heir who committed suicide.” Above it is a copy of her To Smithereens, Drexler’s 1972 novel that moves between the day’s New York art scene and the world of women’s wrestling. There’s also a drawing of two silhouetted women that appears on the book’s cover.

Across from the vitrines are several movie posters that Drexler acquired from her cousin who worked at a movie theater. In these advertisements for pulpy B movies, which she likely never actually watched, she found protean source material. The four men in one part of the poster for FBI Code 98 (1962), for example, feature in F.B.I. (1964). Drexler altered how they appear together, but she kept the stark white background. “So much of the way she paints is by editing the image together, and that’s part of that’s how she composes. It’s like an aggressive editing process,” dealer Garth Greenan, who first started showing her work in 2015, said.  

These men and other figures like them—the shot-up mafioso Dutch Schultz in Portrait of a Mobster (1961) or a canoodling couple from Pretty Boy Floyd (1960)—act as recurring motifs across Drexler’s oeuvre and archives, reproduced ad nauseam. When incorporating them into a painting, she would take a photocopied iteration, affix it to a canvas or board, and begin painting over it. “She lifted these people because there was the most potential here,” Greenan said. “She was interested in how really intense emotions—anger, fear, love, violence—translate to a work of art, where she could imbue the figure with those.”

One of the show’s largest works, Discovered (1963), places that couple on a white background, though the man’s eye has been almost blacked out. Faded (1962) and Big Moe (1963) both feature the shot-up man against mostly red backgrounds; in Faded he wears an orange shirt and is overlaid atop a circle filled with block letters, while Big Moe has him higher up on the canvas in a green shirt and paired with a Christmas wreath.

Primarily self-taught, Drexler often worked at an intimate scale, mostly for practical reasons. Her studio was smaller than that of her husband, Sherman Drexler, and she often bought canvas boards in multipacks. At this size, she also didn’t have to go to a print shop to scale up the found images she wanted to use in her paintings.

“It was amusing for Rosalyn to be able to make these paintings,” Greenan said. “She really enjoyed being able to do them like that. Rosalyn had smallish posters and a morgue file of newspaper clippings that she could go through. She would look at a headline and then she’d have an image associated with it in her mind. She’d find the match when it worked, stick it on the canvas, bury it in paint, and there was the painting.”

About seven blocks north, on Wednesday afternoon, New York–based fashion designer Rachel Comey held her Spring 2027 runway show, presenting a 39-look collection that took its inspiration from Drexler. (The show’s invitation included an excerpt from Drexler’s 1972 play Softly and Consider the Nearness.) Comey first learned about the artist’s life and work when Garth Greenan director Lloyd Wise reached out to her. Wise had seen Comey’s past collaborations with the New York Review of Books and artist Joan Jonas. “I felt that she would respond to the work,” Wise said, adding the gallery is “always trying to bring new audiences to Drexler’s art,” beyond say an exhibition in a gallery or museum.  

Comey, who regularly gets approached by galleries for such collaborations, said she was particularly taken by the New York Times obituary on Drexler, which described her as an “artistic whirlwind who defied categories” and detailed a life that ranged from painting to writing plays and novels to singing in nightclubs and being a professional wrestler. “She presented herself in that time with such strength and provocation, which I thought was really quite interesting,” Comey told me backstage after the runway show. “She was so brave and so bold—I just love that type of woman.”

The gallery then set up a private viewing of some of Drexler’s paintings for Comey and her team and gave her access to various archival materials. Comey soon went all in on taking inspiration from Drexler, drawn to the fearlessness of her never-ending creativity. “I didn’t want to just take her art and just slap it on the fabric and wear it; I need to make sure it’s something that makes sense for our clients and has meaning and history,” she said.

Comey’s nods to Drexler are mostly subtle, drawing from the artist’s color palette of vibrant hues from bright green and orange to cobalt blue and lilac, with an eye toward their high-contrast juxtapositions, a hallmark of Drexler’s paintings. One look paired a blue dress with a large silver belt, a nod to a wrestling championship belt. The feather earrings draw from Our Lady of Doves (1988), while one dress repeats a drawing of two boxers that is another recurring motif of Drexler’s appearing in color, Going Down, and black and white, On the Nose (both 1991).

One dress also features a blown-up version of the invitation to Drexler’s first New York solo show at Reuben Gallery in 1960. She showed sculptures in that debut, but the gallery closed shortly afterward. The male artists who showed there all soon got new representation, but Drexler didn’t. She thought that it was because she was a sculptor—not because she was a woman—so she decided to take up painting.

The collection also includes what Comey called “fan tees,” which she said are “fun to have as when you’re making a tribute to somebody”; one in blue features a photo of Drexler as a wrestler with text from her 1964 play Home Movies. Several of the models carried copies of Drexler’s novels, including To Smithereens, I Am the Beautiful Stranger (1965), and The Cosmopolitan Girl (1974). “I think all my customers are their reading types,” Comey said.

The most direct translation of a passage from a Drexler painting comes in the form of a green floral dress that Drexler used for a couch and curtains in Night Visitors (1988). Though that painting isn’t featured in the Greenan exhibition, part of its source material is located in one of the vitrines: a photo of mobster Bugsy Siegel shot dead on a floral couch. (In the painting’s window are the four men from the FBI Code 98 poster.)

“I hope that she would appreciate it,” Comey said of her tribute to Drexler. “I think she would be a customer of my world. Whom I’m designing for, they do have elements of how she prioritized her life and worked—how she made herself, that freedom.”

For the past decade, Greenan has been working to bring renewed interest in Drexler, whose success ebbed and flowed during her lifetime. “There’s still so much work to be done,” Greenan said, noting that he will soon start on making a catalog raisonné for the artist. “Seeing her art interpreted in such a radically different way, made me feel like the work we have been doing for years is worthwhile.”

He added, “This exhibition is less about why Rosalyn is a great painter, which she was, and more about why she’s such an interesting case study in art as possibility in New York City.”