Greg Drasler is an American artist known for metaphorical paintings that mix vernacular imagery and decoration and visual and interpretive conundrums.Goodman, Jonathan. "Greg Drasler at Generous Miracles," Art in America, July 2000.Scher, Robin. "Life Is a Highway: Greg Drasler on His New Show at Betty Cuningham Gallery," ARTnews, June 23, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2019. His work explores the construction of identity and memory through painted subjects that range from elaborately constructed interiors to symbolic common objects to patterned panoramas of the American highway.Berlind, Robert. "Greg Drasler at Shea & Beker," Art in America, June 1990.Cohen, David. "Greg Drasler at Betty Cuningham," artcritical, October 5, 2011. Retrieved October 8, 2019. Although representational, Drasler's work eludes defined aesthetic categories such as realism, incorporating elements of surrealism, abstraction, and postmodern bricolage and recontextualization.Young, Christopher R. New Horizons in American Realism, Flint, MI: Flint Institute of Arts, 1991. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Edelman, Robert G. "Recycled Landscape: American Contemporary Landscape Painting," Art Press, Paris, March 1991.Einreinhofer, Nancy. Surrealism in America, Wayne, NJ: William Patterson College, 1988. In an early Art in America review, Robert G. Edelman wrote that Drasler "shares with Magritte the ability to create images that are both convincing and profoundly disorienting";Edelman, Robert G. "Greg Drasler at R.C. Erpf," Art in America, October 1987, p. 188. Jonathan Goodman described his later paintings as enigmatic puzzles meant to be meditated on, as both "visual metaphors for self" and formal statements existing for the sake of psychological mystery. Drasler has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts.Artforum. "2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," Artforum, April 10, 2014. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Artforum. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards More Than $3 Million in Grants," Artforum, April 17, 2019. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Yang, Christina. "Cave Painting," Greg Drasler: Cave Paintings, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1994. His work has been shown at the New Museum, PS1, Whitney Museum Stamford, Artists Space and Carnegie Museum of Art, and reviewed or featured in Art in America,McCarthy, Gerard. Review, Art in America, January 2005. Flash Art,Mahoney, Robert. Review, Flash Art, March–April 1990. New Art Examiner,Liu, Timothy. "Greg Drasler," New Art Examiner, May 2000. The Paris Review,Piepenbring, Dan. "Road Trip," The Paris Review, June 15, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2019. and The New York Times.Raynor, Vivien. "At the Ben Shahn, Surrealism's Legacy," The New York Times, February 21, 1988. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Zimmer, William. "When Daily Life Is Examined Closely," The New York Times, July 2, 2000, Section CN, p. 14. Retrieved October 8, 2019. Drasler lives in Tribeca, New York City with his wife, artist Nancy Davidson, and teaches at Pratt Institute.Butler, Sharon. "Studio visit with Greg Drasler," Two Coats of Paint, June 23, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Archives of American Art. "Nancy Davidson papers, 1970s-2016," Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
Early life and career Drasler was born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952.Hamill, Pete. Tools as Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Retrieved October 8, 2019. He was influenced in the 1960s by seeing James Rosenquist's room-spanning F-111, as well as the work of H. C. Westermann and Chicago Imagists such as Jim Nutt and Roger Brown, and studied art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Neal, Patrick. "Painting Matters Now," Hyperallergic, April 25, 2013. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Schufli, Bridey "Interview with Greg Drasler," Romanov Grave, April 9, 2012. Retrieved October 8, 2019. In 1978, a fire destroyed all of his possessions and artwork in diverse media, except for two paintings; afterwards, he committed to painting as his medium. After earning a BFA (1980), he enrolled in the school's Year in Japan Program, which heightened an interest in the relationship between place and identity and encouraged his future use of vernacular imagery.
in 1983 after completing his MFA, Drasler moved to New York City and began exhibiting professionally.Sim, Jiyong. " An Interview with Greg Drasler," Simpl Mag, June 8, 2019. Retrieved October 8, 2019. In his first decade there, he appeared in two shows curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum (the inaugural "On View," 1983; "Other Man: Alternative Views of Masculinity," 1987), as well as group exhibitions at Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco), Jack Tilton and Artists Space (New York), Carnegie Museum of Art, and Knoxville Museum of Art.Tucker, Marcia. "The Other Man: Alternative Representations of Masculinity," in Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, Lisa Phillips et al. (ed.), Getty Research Institute, 2019. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Edelman, Robert G. The Transformative Vision: Contemporary American Landscape Painting, The Carnegie Museum of Art, 1989.Green, Renée. "What's Painting Got to Do with It?" in Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, by Renée Green, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Early solo exhibitions took place at the R.C. Erpf (1985–7) and Shea & Beker (1990) galleries in New York and Marianne Deson (1988) and Center for Contemporary Art (1990) in Chicago.Artner, Alan G. "Art that pries," Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1990.Yau, John. In the Realm of the Plausible, New York: Betty Cuningham, 1990.
In subsequent years, Drasler has had solo exhibitions in New York (Queens Museum of Art, 1994; Betty Cuningham Gallery, 2007–16), Boston, California, Chicago and Seattle; he has appeared in group shows at the New Museum, PS1, Whitney Museum Stamford, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others. Drasler has been a member of the Fine Arts faculty at Pratt Institute since 2005, and prior to that, taught at Montclair State University, Princeton University, Hofstra University and Williams College.Berger, Joseph. "An Exhibition for Students Who Lost Art in a Studio Fire," The New York Times, April 10, 2013. Retrieved October 8, 2019.Pratt Institute, Fine Arts. "Greg Drasler." Faculty. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
Work and reception Drasler's paintings explore liminal spaces and thresholds between places or states of being (inside and out, here or there, public and private, real and imaginary, object and environment); these include suitcases, bedrooms, automobile interiors, the American highway and roadhouse, and film sets. He employs strategies of bricolage, recycling and displacement, packing his images with signs, symbols, metaphors, pattern and design, visual puzzles and puns.Drier, Deborah. "Interiors," Greg Drasler: Cave Paintings, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1994.United States Embassy Brussels. ART in Embassies, United States Department of State, 2010. Retrieved October 8, 2019. These elements convey humor, nostalgia, and a sense of the uncanny in examinations of the self and its relationship to personal space, location, and local culture.
Figurative and "Baggage" paintings (1983–1990) Drasler's early work focused on home builder and handyman imagery that functioned as an allegory for self-construction. After moving to New York, he began painting objects that served as human stand-ins and lone figures, often with unexpected props, in forlorn landscapes.Zimmer, William. "At Rutgers-Newark: An Exhibition of Unusual Self-Portraits," The New York Times, July 19, 1987. Retrieved October 8, 2019. Reviewers described them as hovering between memory and dream, noting in figurative works, such as Headlights (1986), Laocoön (1987) or Mercury Rising (1990), a sense of isolation and visual conceit that sometimes alluded to the miraculous or mythological.
His "Baggage Paintings" (1987–90) depict plush period gear in apparently random but carefully composed states—stacked (Samson and Delilah), rifled through (Customs), grouped (Deposed or Baggage Claim)—that imply allegories of identity, luxury and privacy, and toy with conventions of literature and representation, such as the still life, landscape and Minimalism. Critics such as Robert Berlind describe them as meticulously detailed with "virtuosic, fluid brushwork" emphasizing the play of reflected light and color and a playful style that lulls viewers into a "cheery complicity" often undermined by darker elements. With Samsonite (1990)—a wide-open, empty suitcase with fabric lining like rumpled sheets, implying a private, sexual component—Drasler signaled his shift in the next two decades to interiors as sites for exploring subjectivity.
Interiors (1990–2010) Drasler's "Cave Painting" worksGreg Drasler website. "Cave Painting," Paintings. Retrieved October 8, 2019. depict intricately constructed, ornate interiors that serve as metaphors for the interior construction of the self and the human relationship to personal, domestic space. They pair his interests in contemporary psychoanalytic theoryDrasler, Greg. "Painting into a Corner: Representation as Shelter," in The Vitality of Objects: Exploring the work of Christopher Bollas, Joseph Scalia (ed.), London: Continuum Press; Wesleyan Press, 2002. and home design—architecture, ornament, wallpaper and fabric—in theatrical, film set-like scenes characterized by human absence, visual conundrums, and trompe-l'œil obfuscation.Edelman, Robert G. "The Tranquil Domicile as Grand Illusion," Greg Drasler: Cave Paintings, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1994. In formal terms, critics note the work's technical facility, illusionistic perspective, and effective blend of periods and motifs, noting links to Vuillard's confined spaces, eighteenth-century idealizations of nature, and the Baroque; in psychological terms, they suggest it draws viewers in voyeuristically, through a dreamlike, vaguely unsettling presence and furtive signs that imply the traces left in vacated rooms or closely guarded secrets.
Drasler created enigmatic, Magritte-like formal and psychological puzzles in paintings such as Changing Room (1994), whose surreal trompe-l'œil draped sheets, mirror reflections and painted landscape mural camouflage both architecture and purpose. Robert G. Edelman suggests these paintings slowly reveal "wry and portentous secrets" like Velázquez's Las Meninas or De Chirico's piazzas, which similarly resist resolution. In other paintings, such as Restless Bedroom (1992), Drasler conveys a more animate spirit with enveloping swaths of fabric or nature motifs that blur boundaries between organic and man-made, inside and outside, and figure and ground. He also introduced suspended common objects (a tomato pincushion in Green Room, 1995; linked hangers in Mobile, 2001) and symbolic wallpaper patterns into his work (a bluebird and birdcage, beehive, and ball and chain in Facts of Life, 1995) that allude to psychosexual dramas to untangle.Altieri, Charles. "Reading Polytheogamy," Polytheogamy, Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2009.