(Portland, Maine) Moss Galleries is pleased to announce that it will open a new location on Portland’s Eastern Waterfront at 100 Fore Street on Saturday, December 11, by appointment only. The new gallery will open with the inaugural exhibition of paintings by accomplished Maine painter Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928-1999). Lynne Mapp Drexler: Orchestrations in Color will be on view through December 31, 2021.
Lynne Mapp Drexler: Orchestrations in Color will feature 18 works painted by Drexler between 1966 and 1979. These large-scale lush colorful abstract works—elements of which recall the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt—show the progression of her artistic development and maturity as an artist. Drexler was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist artist with a distinctive painting style. Her vibrant paintings, executed with large, exuberant brush strokes, derive from abstract visions of both the landscape and still life. She was among the few female Abstract Expressionists during this time, and her work was often overlooked by the New York establishment. Drexler’s work has been in high demand after one of her paintings was featured in the home of celebrities Chrissy Teigen and John Legend in the February 2015 issue of Architectural Digest. TheDecember 2021/Jan 2022 issue of Arts & Antiques magazine will feature an in-depth story about her life and work.
“This is the largest exhibition of Drexler’s works in Maine since the Portland Museum of Art's retrospective in 2008,” said Gallery Owner Elizabeth Moss. “It follows our virtual exhibition, Bathed in Color, that we showcased in 2020. Both exhibitions reflect our gallery’s close ties to the late artist and are a testament to the primary role Maine played in Drexler’s life and work. It’s an honor to open my new gallery in Portland with an exhibition of her work.”
Lynne Mapp Drexler was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928. In the 1950s, she studied with one of the founders of the modernist movement, Hans Hofmann, in both his New York and Provincetown schools. His most famous tenet was the concept of “push and pull” where space, depth, and even movement on a canvas could be created abstractly using color and shape, rather than representational forms. Drexler embodied this concept with her early work focused on bright colors and composition. She would later incorporate representation into her work in the 1980s. In graduate school at Hunter College in New York, Drexler studied with Robert Motherwell, the prolific painter and art critic.
In 1961, her work first came to the attention of well-known contemporary artists who were members of the Tanager Gallery, an artists operated collective active in New York City from 1952-1962. Among the painters featured at Tanager were Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Lois Dodd, and Sally Hazelet. In her solo exhibition at Tanager, Drexler had the opportunity to present her mature and independent style for the first time.
In 1962, she married fellow painter John Hultberg (1922-2005) and began summering on Monhegan Island, where she started to work and sketch outdoors. In the winters back in New York, she would transform these sketches into luxurious and colorful abstract landscapes. Drexler's love of nature became intimately intertwined into her work. The artist finally moved permanently to Monhegan in 1983 and lived there until her death in 1999. Of the many artists who painted on Monhegan, she was one of only two —the other one being the watercolorist S.P.R. Triscott (1846-1925) – who have lived year-round and died on the island.
Drexler exhibited extensively throughout her life. In 2008 she was honored with solo shows at the Monhegan Museum and the Portland Museum of Art. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Monhegan Museum, Farnsworth Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others.
About Moss Galleries:
In 2004, with the dream of being at the forefront of recognizing Maine’s role in American Art, Elizabeth Moss created Moss Galleries in Falmouth, Maine. Over the course of 17 years, Elizabeth and her team have established a gallery of national and international repute, recently being named one of the top 500 Galleries in North America by ArtInfo. The gallery represents a plethora of artists who create in a vast range of artistic styles ranging from abstract to traditional seascapes. Moss Galleries strives to highlight Maine artists and their role in the American art scene at large, as well as the importance Maine plays in each of their work. Moss Galleries second gallery located in Portland, Maine opens December 11, by appointment only.
Moss Galleries
Portland Gallery:
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Falmouth Gallery:
251 US-1
Falmouth, ME 04105
207-781-2620
Contact: Kristen Levesque
Kristen Levesque PR & Marketing
207-329-3090
kristen@kristenlevesquepr.com
