COL Gallery is pleased to present Lynne Drexler / Vivian Springford, an exhibition bringing together two of the most vital and under recognized figures in twentieth-century American abstraction. On view from July 17th through August 29th, the show presents paintings and works on paper spanning four decades.

 

Lynne Drexler (1928–1999) and Vivian Springford (1913–2003) worked at the height of the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field movements, yet both remained largely outside the commercial and critical machinery that defined the era's canon. Today, with scholarly and institutional attention to their work growing steadily, their paintings demand reconsideration, not as footnotes to a male-dominated history, but as its equal and essential counterparts.

 

Working in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Drexler developed what would become her signature style: dense, tessellated fields of short, rhythmic brushstrokes laid side by side like fragments of mosaic or stained glass. The five gouaches presented here reveal an artist at a moment of rapid discovery, already in full command of a visual language that would sustain her for decades. In 1970, Drexler's world suddenly became muted when a mental breakdown triggered temporary, psychosomatic color blindness. Rather than stop working, she turned to music specifically Wagner's Ring Cycle and she often attended  the Metropolitan Opera with a sketchbook. Shadowed Memories (1976) and Contained Energy (1979) read almost like visual transcriptions of music: dense, layered, with an interior drama that doesn't announce itself loudly.

 

A student of Hans Hofmann and a longtime presence in the New York art world, Springford developed her signature acrylic staining technique across decades of sustained experimentation. By the 1970s, she had arrived at the work for which she is best known: the Expansionist Series. Working with pigment diluted in water and poured directly onto the support, she guided rather than controlled the paint's movement, letting it seep and feather on its own. The results feel less painted than discovered. A pivotal catalyst came in 1976, when she traveled to Guadeloupe and witnessed the eruption of La Grande Soufrière — colors exploding outward from a molten center. Rather than depict the eruption, she sought to mimic the creation of nature itself, her pooling and layering of liquid acrylic approximating the same forces.

 

Presented together, Drexler and Springford illuminate the richness and diversity of an American abstraction that has long been incompletely told. Their work is united not by a shared style but by a shared seriousness and a commitment to painting as a practice of discovery, pursued across lifetimes and largely on their own terms.