Rosalyn Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler was one of the early artists to mine American kitsch and pop culture for her practice. In the early 1960s, Drexler created paintings by collaging images from B-movies, tabloids, and pulp novels directly onto her canvases, before painting over them in a cool, flat style with acrylic paint. These works were exhibited alongside paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and others in the “First International Girlie Exhibit”, an early exhibition of the Pop movement. But unlike her counterparts’ smooth, machinelike methods of creating surfaces, Drexler’s hand was evident in her work. Her life has been as multifaceted as her subject matter; Drexler was a professional wrestler and a novelist, and has written, among other things, an adaptation of the screenplay Rocky.