January 13 - February 12, 2005

Sherman Drexler has been a long-lived presence in the New York art world, a certain archetype of the urban art intelligentsia in the decades after World War II. Outgoing and loquacious, Drexler has always been everywhere. His art however, figurative and obstinately under-refined, stood at a unique remove from the historical movements of the day. As a result of this fierce and affecting independence, Drexler's paintings have yet to receive their due.

Sherman Drexler's nude figures are strong, fleet Everywomen. But it is his wife Rosalyn - the writer and Pop artist - that is the explicitly unremarked subject of his art. In the 1960s few well-known painters were painting nudes and Andy Warhol, typically, asked Drexler how on earth he ever came up with such an original idea. The artist, non-plussed, answered honestly that he did not know. Drexler's paintings were shown at Tibor De Nagy in the early 1960s, later at Graham Gallery and Max Hutchinson's, and were the subject of a solo exhibition at P.S. 1 in 1984. Drexler's painting grows out of A.P. Ryder, Giotto, Bonnard and Rothko, all assembled in a personal amalgam of prehistoric intensity that gives his old, crowded Newark NJ studio the lives-lived patina of a late 20th century Lascaux.

Now 80 years old, Sherman Drexler has been and remains an extraordinarily prolific artist. His studio is filled with a lifetime of paintings, the table tops are cluttered with stones, fragments of concrete and pieces of metal. From this found debris the artist coaxes his hidden figures, as artists have done on rock walls for 50,000 years. Many modern artists have embraced the primitive and mythic; from Picasso and Matisse, to the De Koonings and George McNeil, to James Brown and Donald Baechler. Drexler's art is an important, underknown link in this lineage.