Greg Drasler
Chain, 2020
Oil on linen
40 x 44 inches
Slept Here, 2019
Oil on linen
40 x 44 inches
Dealership, 2020
Oil on linen
40 x 44 inches
Ink Blot, 2019
Oil on Linen
40 x 32 inches
Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to open External Drive, an exhibition of new paintings by Greg Drasler. This will be the artist’s sixth exhibition with the gallery, located at 15 Rivington Street, New York, NY. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday November 16, from 6-8 PM.
Just as a journey down an open highway offers dramatic changes of scenery, so does Greg Drasler’s External Drive, an exhibition of new paintings. In Rear View, 2019, the windshield of an automobile is included, providing the scale that frames or reflects the landscape. It orients you as the road divides the landscape and sky into kaleidoscopic patterns of color and light, marking both the vast view and the speed of travel.
In Dealership, 2020, the car disappears. A bold edge remains to guide sight, but the focus is far beyond the confines of a physical space. It finds its reference in the visual design of Tiepolo’s Virtues from the ceiling of Scuola del Carmine in Venice. The framing is no longer a car window, but rather a nod to the history of art.
Drasler paints aerial and terrestrial views in the series, There and Back, 2023 – looking down and looking up, expanding from all angles - speeding us down the highway, with the top down. His External Drive has shifted into a perceptual high gear.
Born in Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received a BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. He has exhibited regularly in the US since the mid 80's. Drasler has been the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993) and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1991). He is currently a Professor at Pratt Institute and previously taught at Princeton University. Widely collected privately, Drasler’s work can be seen in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc., New York, NY; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; The Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY; Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE.
This exhibition is accompanied by illustrated catalogue and online viewing room. For more infromation on Greg Drasler and External Drive, click the linkes below:
In the rush of narrative, we lost this moment of plenary bliss; the aesthetics of nature, coded by culture to be sure, are summoned to stall our pell-mell forward rush through narrative. For a short while we gaze, with Godard, upon resplendent beauty. There is a clue hiding in here about to how to think through Greg Drasler’s new series of paintings, titled External Drive, currently at Betty Cunningham.
