Sukanya Rajaratnam On How the Art World Rediscovered Lynne Drexler

With her dazzling and gleaming abstractions, Ab-Ex artist Lynne Drexler has recently attracted much-deserved attention both institutionally and in the art market, following a long-derailed career and a challenging life journey that ultimately led her to live as a “hermit” on an island. Art dealer Sukanya Rajaratnam, who was instrumental in the rediscovery of her art, can pinpoint exactly when everything started: on March 10, 2022, a Christie’s sale highlighted a large Drexler abstraction, which ultimately sold for $1.2 million—far exceeding its $60,000 high estimate. “I think many people woke up and said, ‘Who is Lynn Drexler?’” Rajaratnam told Observer. She had recently discovered the artist’s work when she decided to walk to Christie’s after work to check out the mid-season sales. “I was just whizzing through and saw this massive Lynne Drexler painting above the phone banks.” She recalls asking Julian Ehrlich who Drexler was, and in answering, he called the artist ‘a forgotten abstract expressionist from Maine.’ That’s how Drexler was described in most circles—until a group of women came together to champion her work and completely rewrite her posthumous trajectory.

A partner at the historic New York gallery Mnuchin at the time, Rajaratnam had made her name unearthing the work of artists of color and women long overlooked by the canon. She remembers beginning her research into Drexler that same night, and the following day, she called Robert Mnuchin to tell him about her discovery. “‘Look, I don’t have much information, but there’s a painting coming up, and I want to see how it does,’ I told him.”

Following the aforementioned stellar auction result, all eyes turned to the Ab-Ex artist. And yet, as nothing comes from nothing in the art market, it was clear the moment had long before been set in motion—likely orchestrated by a group of collectors who had been acquiring Drexler’s work and were now seeking to relaunch her market presence. Rajaratnam was characteristically proactive and immediately tracked down the estate—or rather, as they refer to it, her archive—and discovered they were already in conversation with the pair of powerhouse dealers behind Berry Campbell Gallery, known for their role in reviving market and institutional interest in historically overshadowed women abstractionists.

Instead of competing, Rajaratnam proposed collaborating to promote Drexler’s work, and all parties agreed to structure that promotion strategically to support lasting recognition and avoid the pitfalls of a fast-bursting, speculation-led market bubble. The result of the partnership was a two-part exhibition shown across both galleries, uptown and downtown, divided chronologically: Mnuchin Gallery, at its uptown location, presented paintings from 1959 to 1964, while Berry Campbell in Chelsea featured a series of works from 1965 to 1969. Accompanying both shows was a jointly produced catalog, created to ground the initiative in serious scholarship and provide context through essays supporting Drexler’s reintroduction to international collectors. “That was the winning strategy,” according to Rajaratnam.

When Rajaratnam left Mnuchin in January 2023, the archive asked her to stay on as its main advisor. After fifteen years at the gallery, she wasn’t looking to immediately join another one, hoping instead to focus on philanthropic initiatives in art and education. At the time, Artnet reported that she was planning to establish a scholarship fund at Cambridge University for women from Sri Lanka, aiming to sponsor at least one woman through undergraduate studies each year. But when White Cube opened in New York, she accepted a role as global director of strategic market initiatives—a fitting title for someone who has consistently shifted attention toward historically marginalized Black and women artists, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas and Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

Upon joining White Cube, Rajaratnam also brought Drexler’s archive with her. “I thought the gallery was the perfect fit for the archive, and the collaboration with Barry Campbell could still work,” she said. “We decided that Barry Campbell would manage her market in the U.S., and White Cube would handle the market outside of the U.S. with its global presence.”

Following a debut exhibition at White Cube London last year—“Lynne Drexler: The Sixties,” which closed in January and marked the artist’s major introduction to audiences in the U.K. and Europe, the gallery is now ready to bring Drexler’s work to the Asian market during Art Basel Hong Kong. Asian buyers, however, are not entirely unfamiliar with the artist. Rajaratnam clarified that some of the works in Mnuchin’s first show had already sold in the region. “There is already some knowledge of Drexler’s work.”

Drexler’s work revolved around investigations of color, space and form, resulting in a highly personal synthesis of Post-Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Her work, Rajaratnam said, diverges sharply from the more spontaneous, heroic gestural modes of her male counterparts and aligns only partially with the lyricism that defines the abstractions of other women of her time—or the generation before—such as Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler or Elaine de Kooning. Her approach to abstraction and painting is distinctly meditative and calculated, informed by a deep awareness of the entire history of painting. References to Van Gogh, Seurat and the mosaic-like intricacies of Klimt’s compositions appear throughout her vibrant, densely patterned canvases, built up through tessellated yet thickly material brushstrokes.

“I think the staying power of her work and the reason why there is such a wide there’s a broad spectrum of collectors—impressionist collectors buy her job, but also contemporary collectors like her work—is that she was able to marry post-impressionism with abstract expressionism,” Rajaratnam said.

More specifically, inspired by the “push-pull” theory of Hans Hofmann (whom she studied under, as she did with Robert Motherwell), Drexler made dynamic relationships of color the core of her abstraction—creating depth through chromatic interplay while embracing the same tactile, physically immersive method as Pollock. She danced with color across the canvas, painting on the floor to create nonhierarchical compositions. Yet despite these clear influences, Drexler steadily developed her own visual language, with a signature brushwork made up of swatch-like strokes clustered densely to animate the surface of the canvas. Working through contrasts and juxtapositions of warm and cool tones and shifting gradients, her bright and dynamic chromatic fields captivate the viewer with lyrical and joyful synesthesias of color and light.

This meditative aspect of her practice—the calculated gestures aimed at translating both the psychical reality and its accompanying sensations atmospherically and plastically—resonates with certain Eastern aesthetic principles, a connection that may explain why Asian buyers are particularly receptive to and understanding of her work.

Nevertheless, while previous exhibitions have centered on Drexler’s work from the 1960s, the Hong Kong presentation will mark the first time her paintings from the 1970s are shown, featuring boldly colored canvases and works on paper created between 1970 and 1978. This marks a deliberate strategy to build and sustain awareness and appreciation of the artist’s full and varied body of work across time. “I think that’s significant as we build out her legacy.”

In the 1970s, Drexler explored an even more nuanced interplay of gradients and contrasts—balancing more saturated tones with darker passages, as if subtly shifting the compositional rhythm to reflect a different moment in her life.

At the time, she had just returned to New York after a difficult period as a wife, though she quickly became the caretaker of her partner and husband, the painter John Hultberg. It was a relationship that for Drexler proved tiring, complex and often strained—shaped by the inequalities of their artistic trajectories and the personal turbulence that followed. Hultberg, as a man, was able to achieve success with relative ease but soon succumbed to the collateral effects of that success: alcoholism and numerous extramarital affairs. “He was getting artists residencies and teaching positions nationwide, and she would just follow him. He was a very heavy drinker, having multiple affairs, including with his dealer, Martha Jackson,” Rajaratnam said. “As a young woman, Drexler didn’t know what she was walking into when they married, and she essentially became his caretaker.”

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This intense period of emotional stress and psychological strain may have contributed to a temporary episode of color blindness that Drexler suffered—an experience that likely influenced this particular body of work, according to Rajaratnam. “You can see in these works this gradation of the same color. However, we are hypothesizing because no one was here to interview her then. Still, we suspect it’s because of the color blindness that she went in that direction.”

More crucially, in 1970, Drexler was hospitalized for a breakdown, from which she began to recover by attending matinee performances at the Metropolitan Opera—drawing what she saw and spontaneously translating the music through visual rhythm. “That’s probably why some of the paintings in the 70s also have a very tonal quality,” Rajaratnam suggested. In this extremely delicate period of offuscated sensations, Drexler seems to have pushed her abstraction even further into the non-representational realm, producing paintings that feel fully detached from the natural references still present in her earlier works—which, though abstract, retained lush, almost floral or landscape-like sensibilities.

The 1970s marked a significant shift in the world of painting, as artists moved further away from representational forms and embraced a purely abstract visual language—even as Drexler’s works from the decade retained poetic titles anchored in nature. Her paintings from this period are defined by their focus on juxtaposed colors, contrasting tones and the rhythmic application of brushstrokes, often evoking the dynamic tensions within a musical composition—where high and low notes, pauses and climactic moments combine to create an immersive sensorial experience. In exploring the purely visual and emotional potential of painting, these abstractions—already untethered from the constraints of representation—likely became, for Drexler, a vehicle of liberation from the constraints of her oppressive personal reality. In them, the artist seems to have tuned herself to a more sublime, universal rhythm of the natural world around her—its eternal cycles and the perpetual flow of energy and matter—suggesting a state of ongoing transformation.

It wasn’t until 1983 that Drexler finally separated from Hultberg and left their toxic relationship behind, settling permanently on Monhegan Island. There, her work began to absorb and reflect the rugged coastal scenery around her. Though still largely undiscovered by the broader art world, Drexler became locally known during the final two decades of her life, exhibiting in galleries on the island and nearby mainland. Her later works marked a return to representational imagery, with still lifes and interiors replacing the earlier abstractions. “When you look at her work from the ‘80s and ‘90s, she does these still lifes and interiors. And if you put that next to a Matthew Wong, it is unbelievably similar,” Rajaratnam said.

This first Asian exhibition aims to deepen collectors’ understanding and appreciation of the many facets of Drexler’s diverse and vibrant oeuvre. “She has four and a half decades of production, and the world only knows the ‘60s because that’s what the first shows were built on, and that’s what people have seen so far at auction. People don’t know the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. As the advisor of the archive, now I want to make sure those decades are covered,” Rajaratnam concluded. “I think that, in that sense, she connects from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century. This is something quite unique and makes her much more than an Ab-Ex artist.”

“Lynne Drexler: The Seventies” opens at White Cube Hong Kong on March 26 and runs through May 17, 2025.