External Drive
Greg Drasler
November 16, 2023 – January 27, 2024
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.
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.
"One Question, One Answer: Greg Drasler"
By: Daniel Wiener
"Metaphorical depictions of construction sites and workers have inspired Greg Drasler’s paintings since the early 1980s. Accumulations of tools and objects populated his paintings, addressing the construction of identity. Crowds of men in hats along with the baggage paintings contained humor, nostalgia, and memory in ongoing assemblies of selves. Drasler describes his painting process as packing and re-packing an empty suitcase or painting the inside out."
"Greg Drasler: Crowded Places / Open Spaces at Betty Cuningham Gallery, in Dialogue with Greg Drasler"
By: Etty Yaniv
"Greg Drasler came to be a metaphorical figurative painter when he lost everything he owned in a fire in 1978, except for two paintings. At that moment he decided to focus exclusively on painting — he was a painter and painting would be everything he needed."
The result manifests in “Stratocaster Suite,” a series of six luminous 70 x 400 inch oil-painted panels Drasler created for the show. Stretching across the length of a room, “Stratocaster Suite” is an ode to the open road.
Drasler is fond of metaphors. For instance, he once noted in an interview, “I think about the car as a camera, and painting as a vehicle.” But a vehicle for what? In a conversation, condensed and lightly edited below, Drasler expanded on this metaphor and other symbols contained within his work.
Entering the Castle Gallery at the College of New Rochelle, visitors encounter an arrangement of cherry blossoms in a glass vase. At least that’s what it appears to be. Closer observation reveals that the branch holding the flowers is actually a segment of plumbing pipe and that each delicate bud is a tiny pink toilet made of urethane foam.
