About Gabriele Drexler

Inspiration

PREPARED PICTURE ART - BEER PORTRAITS

The painter did not ask the actor Fritz Wepper into the studio, but portrayed him at the bar. The picture that Wepper shows in a blue-purple suit on a bar stool is honest, direct and ruthless. The composition has nothing to gloss over it. As with Dorn, the focus is not on the body of the person portrayed with sweeping strokes, but on his face, especially the area around the eyes. Wepper looks at the viewer from two reddish cavities (does he even look at us or does he look through us?) That peek out of a pasty face. It is an exhausted look that at the same time tells of an eventful life.

The portraits that Gabriele Drexler takes of international artists or high officials and dignitaries are of a completely different approach and style. There is always an exciting deformation of several media taking place here: A reverse spelling from the Internet through photography to painting. Images that the artist unearths on the World Wide Web are photographed in a first step and then serve as a template for her portraits in a second step. What is left of the razor-sharp, high-resolution (Internet) photographs at the end of the multi-stage work process is pure atmosphere. Chancellor Merkel, striding forward and determined and strained, followed by a three-headed male entourage (in the background you can still see the politician limousines) symbolizes only one thing: power. We are told neither the time nor the place at which the original picture was taken. Which is also irrelevant. Gabriele Drexler's large-format picture does not need an exact reference to a politicians summit, but it generally captures the aura of power that surrounds important decision-makers.

From Lucian Freud, to whom we owe the most impressive (self) portraits in the art of the 20th century, the saying has been passed down: “My portraits should correspond to people, not resemble them.” The same can be said about Gabriele's eloquent portrait art Drexler say.

Florian Welle is a cultural journalist and author and writes for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others.

Working approach

URBAN LANDSCAPES

Scenes from the city, scenes on the street - these are the themes that define Gabriele Drexler's “driving images”. “Driving pictures”, that means: The artist travels to German cities, Berlin for example, Cottbus, Leipzig, Dresden or of course her hometown Munich, sits in the tram and the bus and sketches the impressions that are presented to the eye during this driving experience. These are inevitably fleeting scenarios: road traffic, passers-by in a hurry, but also facades, high-rise buildings, modern commercial buildings, old churches and city palaces - the witnesses of history that are still present in our cities are mixed with everyday life that seems to have been detached from history.

These themes and the way they are represented call for a very unique style: it consists of a tempo-emphasized serial painting that is driven, as it were, by the motifs. This creates images of strong colors and a rhythm that corresponds to the dynamic life of the modern city. In a virtuoso game with abstraction and objectivity, Drexler succeeds in gaining an aesthetic that is full of tension from the contradiction between her theme, speed and dynamics, and her artistic form of expression, the image.

Gabriele Drexler consciously draws on the diverse possibilities of a long European painting tradition that goes back to the old masters via postmodern and modernity. Familiar with these painting styles, she is not afraid to use them to prove her craftsmanship and to form her own and unmistakable handwriting from the tradition.

Drexler's first “Germany Cycle” consists primarily of cities in the new federal states and will be rounded off by a cycle from old West Germany. Drexler explores the past and present of her country - her pictures reflect a feeling of home, freed of all "fatherland" pathos, looking for contemporary identity, which also stimulates the viewer to ask: What does home mean in a globalized time?

Bernhard Viel is a cultural journalist and writer, his books are published by the publishers Matthes & Seitz and CHBeck

The artist Gabriele Drexler has been devoting herself increasingly to portraits of aristocrats and celebrities since 2012. So at the beginning of her examination of the time-honored genre (the Egyptians led the portrait to its first bloom) stands the painting by the opera singer Ann-Kathrin Naidu. In 2013 a series of works was created, which show Drexler's relentless endeavors in a remarkable way not just to take a portrayal of the person portrayed, but to grasp their personality. Finally, the word portrait (Latin protrahere = to prefer) can be translated as “bring to light” or “discover”.