1. Greg Drasler is an American artist known for metaphorical paintings that mix vernacular imagery and decoration and visual and interpretive conundrums.
21 Facts About Greg Drasler
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Greg Drasler's work explores the construction of identity and memory through painted subjects that range from elaborately constructed interiors to symbolic common objects to patterned panoramas of the American highway.
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Greg Drasler has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts.
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Greg Drasler's work has been shown at the New Museum, PS1, Whitney Museum Stamford, Artists Space and Carnegie Museum of Art, and reviewed or featured in Art in America, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, The Paris Review, and The New York Times.
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Greg Drasler was influenced in the 1960s by seeing James Rosenquist's room-spanning F-111, as well as the work of H C Westermann and Chicago Imagists such as Jim Nutt and Roger Brown, and studied art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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In 1983 after completing his MFA, Greg Drasler moved to New York City and began exhibiting professionally.
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In subsequent years, Greg Drasler has had solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, California, Chicago and Seattle; he has appeared in group shows at the New Museum, PS1, Whitney Museum Stamford, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.
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Greg Drasler has been a member of the Fine Arts faculty at Pratt Institute since 2005, and prior to that, taught at Montclair State University, Princeton University, Hofstra University and Williams College.
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Greg Drasler's paintings explore liminal spaces and thresholds between places or states of being ; these include suitcases, bedrooms, automobile interiors, the American highway and roadhouse, and film sets.
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Greg Drasler employs strategies of bricolage, recycling and displacement, packing his images with signs, symbols, metaphors, pattern and design, visual puzzles and puns.
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Greg Drasler's "Cave Painting" works depict intricately constructed, ornate interiors that serve as metaphors for the interior construction of the self and the human relationship to personal, domestic space.
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In other paintings, such as Restless Bedroom, Greg Drasler conveys a more animate spirit with enveloping swaths of fabric or nature motifs that blur boundaries between organic and man-made, inside and outside, and figure and ground.
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Greg Drasler introduced suspended common objects and symbolic wallpaper patterns into his work that allude to psychosexual dramas to untangle.
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Greg Drasler employed pattern in his "Hats Paintings", approaching abstraction in canvasses filled edge-to-edge with seas of anonymous men in subtly shaded fedoras, their faces turned away or hidden beneath the hats.
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Greg Drasler employed them in visually enigmatic paintings such as Green Screen, Road Trip and Internal Combustion, set against backdrops or green-screens; the backgrounds, representing the potential of inexhaustible, to-be-determined locations, extended metaphors regarding the freedom and imaginative capacity offered by the automobile.
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Greg Drasler packed the pictorial frames of works such as On the Lam with objects, decorative and Native American patterns, and Americana travel references.
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Greg Drasler used his 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship to drive cross-country, gathering ideas that would emerge in his "Road Trip" works.
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Greg Drasler drew inspiration from the expansive, big-sky vistas of the Midwest and the vernacular architecture of the American roadhouse.
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Greg Drasler reconfigured these inspirations on canvas with crazy-quilt patterning suggesting both the landscape's vast reach and its man-made division into property.
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Greg Drasler collaborated with poet Timothy Liu on the book Polytheogamy, consisting of interleafed images of Drasler's paintings with Liu's poetry.
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Greg Drasler has received artist residencies from Djerassi and the MacDowell Colony.