I am the Beautiful Stranger will reexamine the distinct contributions Drexler made as the Pop Art Movement was coalescing.  As early as 1960, Drexler was using the icons of Pop Culture as the organizing subject matter of her work.  Images of gangster B-movies, tabloid journalism, and pulp detective novels were collaged directly onto the canvases and then entirely “re-painted” to create the kind of graphically transformed and narratively intensified work associated with the great pioneers of art in the early sixties.  Drexler went on to hone her technique to powerfully expose society’s raw nerves in her emotionally charged, ambiguous scenes of sex, violence and the isolation of man in the 20^th century. 

Works on view in I am the Beautiful Stranger include studies and paintings for Men and Machines, a series devoted to the post-war fascination and use of technology, and Is it True What They Say about Dixie? (1966), a portrait of Alabama’s segregationist Sheriff “Bull” Connor and fellow supporters. They also range from the cinematic and psychologically charged Marilyn Pursued by Death (1963) to the simultaneously sunny but corporately bland depiction of Lear Executive (1967). The paintings evoke an era through their style and subject matter but remain current through their broader connection to media and American cultural issues.

In his catalogue essay, Arne Glimcher remarks that “her art is central to the American avant garde’s awakening to popular culture as source material in the creation of a new aesthetic of objectivity after the extremely subjective sensibility of Abstract Expressionism and it’s concept of the sublime…. You had to think about her art. Its imagery was complex and was much harder to immediately recall than her contemporaries, iconic in incident rather than image.”

Rosalyn Drexler’s first solo exhibition was held at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1960. A series of one-person and group shows followed, and in 1986 the artist was the subject of Intimate Emotions: A Retrospective of Paintings at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Curated by Thomas Sokolowski, now the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the exhibition traveled to the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina and The University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Drexler’s work was again examined in three recent surveys: Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man at the Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2006); Rosalyn Drexler; To Smithereens: Paintings 1961–2003, held at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2004); and I Won't Hurt You: Paintings 1962-1999 Nicholas Davies Gallery in association with Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York City (2000).