Rosalyn Drexler: My Life Has a Life of Its Own — Rosalyn Drexler

To inaugurate its new space at 25 Greene Street in SoHo, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present Rosalyn Drexler: My Life Has a Life of Its Own , a major exhibition dedicated to the Bronx-born artist. Curated by Fiona Laugharn, the presentation is on view from September 9 through October 24, 2026. The show is the fifth presentation of Drexler’s work with the gallery, and her first exhibition since her death last year at the age of 98.

The exhibition offers a detailed overview of Drexler’s landmark Pop work of the 1960s. Featuring private and institutional loans, the show reunites several important works and series from this generative decade. To augment these iconic paintings, the show also presents a selection of never-before-seen drawings, objects, source imagery, and journals. These materials—uncovered through newly conducted archival research—provide, for the first time, a full picture of Drexler’s creative activities, tracing the depth and complexity of her sui generis approach to the appropriated image.

Organized into three sections, the show provides fresh insights into Drexler’s process and themes. “The Image” features Drexler’s early freehand drawings and paintings paired with newly discovered source material, laying out Drexler’s signature process of direct citation via overpainted collage. “Image and Text” examines the role of the written word in Drexler’s work, displaying her iconic text-based paintings alongside the notebooks and sketchbooks that were the engine of her creative activity as an artist and an award-winning writer. Finally, “Return to Image” highlights the ways in which Drexler’s affinity for specific motifs led her to iterate imagery across decades. In the process, she transformed her own artistic history—her own life—into her most vital source material.

Acting on intuition and using her immediate environment as material, Drexler obsessively collected images, objects, and everyday ephemera. The artworks and materials gathered here are a tribute to the artist’s voracious creativity: revealing the subjects that caught her eye, her artistic process, and her singular perspective on the turbulent culture of the postwar era.

Coinciding with the exhibition, designer Rachel Comey will debut a collection at New York Fashion Week inspired by Drexler’s life and work. In addition, Hagfish books will reissue Drexler’s 1974 novel The Cosmopolitan Girl , following the independent press’s critically celebrated release of Drexler’s To Smithereens (1972) in 2025. In October, Anthology Film Archives has programmed an evening devoted to Drexler’s life, with screenings of the 1975 short documentary Who Does She Think She Is? and select home movies shot by Drexler with her husband, Sherman. Finally, the gallery will host a panel discussion dedicated to Drexler’s life and legacy.

About the Artist Rosalyn Drexler (1926–2025) was born in the Bronx, New York. Part of the original generation of American Pop artists, Drexler began appropriating commercial imagery in the early 1960s—at the same time as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Only recently, however, has she received critical recognition for this achievement. Graphically intense and thematically dark, Drexler’s artworks channel the sinister undercurrents of American life, summoning themes of sexuality, fame, and violence.

Notable exhibitions include: Reuben Gallery (1960, New York), Kornblee Gallery (1964, 1965, 1966, New York), Grey Art Gallery, (1986, New York) Pace Gallery (2007, New York), and Garth Greenan Gallery (2015, 2017, 2019, 2023, New York). A survey exhibition, Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man , took place in 2006 at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery (Newark, New Jersey). A retrospective exhibition, Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? , took place at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2016, Waltham, Massachusetts); it traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in October 2016 and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in February 2017.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Drexler’s paintings were featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Pop Art USA (1963, Oakland Art Museum, California), The Painter and the Photograph (1964, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University), American Pop Art (1974, Whitney Museum of American Art), and Another Aspect of Pop Art , (1978, P.S. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources). Since 2010, her work figured prominently in Sid Sachs’ landmark exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists , 1958–1968 (2010, University of the Arts), Power Up: Female Pop Art (2010 Kunsthalle Wien), Pop to Popism (2014, Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales), International Pop , (2015–2016, Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Human Interest , (2016–2017, Whitney Museum of American Art).

Drexler’s paintings are in the collections of many museums, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College; the Colby College Museum of Art; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Grey Art Gallery, New York University; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; the Wadsworth Athenaeum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.