Lynne Drexler: A Painted Aria, Berry Campbell, New York

Thu 9 Oct 2025 to Sat 15 Nov 2025

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

Berry Campbell presents Lynne Drexler: A Painted Aria. The exhibition celebrates one of the most impassioned periods in Drexler’s career, when her lifelong devotion to music became inseparable from her art. During the mid-1970s, Drexler visited the Metropolitan Opera as often as three times a week. Enraptured by the soaring operas of Wagner and the power of Beethoven, she transformed sound and drama into color, rhythm, and form that reverberate with music itself. This exhibition brings together canvases and works on paper from this pivotal period.

A Painted Aria presents a lesser-known but deeply personal aspect of Drexler’s oeuvre. During this period, she shifted from nature-inspired subjects to abstractions driven by her passion for opera. A six-month episode of color blindness at the end of 1969 further shaped her practice, inspiring a turn toward tonal compositions that redefined the movement and structure of her paintings. She often sketched from a desk at The Metropolitan Opera as the music unfolded around her: “It was just the soaring, the gloriousness of the music." Her paintings from this period pulse with rhythm, motion, and color. They convey the drama and intensity of the music and reflect what art historian Gail Levin describes as “musical analogies in painting,” rooted in her earlier training with Hans Hofmann. Her brushwork often suggests a synesthesia, as color and form vibrate in response to sound, aligning her with figures such as Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent Van Gogh, both of whom she greatly admired.

For Drexler, opera not only offered aesthetic inspiration but an emotional lifeline. The grandeur and drama of Wagner and Beethoven allowed her to transfer personal challenges into a triumphant artistic language. As Levin writes in the catalogue, Drexler’s canvases are “a testament to her strong will to express herself and move beyond the catastrophic events that nearly derailed her journey.”

This exhibition builds on Berry Campbell’s 2022 presentation in collaboration with Mnuchin Gallery, Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, which surveyed her work created between 1959 and 1969. Now, Berry Campbell shifts focus to this transformative and underexplored chapter of her career. Featuring approximately twenty works from the 1970s, including six large-scale canvases, the exhibition offers a view into Drexler’s heightened sense of drama and how music served as both muse and emotional outlet for the artist.