Lynne Drexler / Vivian Springford @ COL Gallery

COL Gallery is pleased to present Lynne Drexler / Vivian Springford, an exhibition bringing together two of the most vital and underrecognized 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.

Lynne Drexler developed one of the most distinctive visual languages in postwar American painting. Working in dense, mosaic-like fields of color, built from thousands of small, interlocking marks, she created compositions of extraordinary vibrancy and depth. The works on view include early gouaches from 1959 and 1960, made during Drexler's formative years in New York, alongside later oil paintings that reveal the full intensity of her mature vision. Shadowed Memories (1976) and Contained Energy (1979) are among the most powerful canvases the artist ever produced: dark, layered, and structurally complex, they pulse with a rhythmic force that is entirely her own.

Vivian Springford pursued a quieter but equally radical path. 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. Her Expansionist Series, represented here by works on paper mounted on Dibond as well as a monumental canvas, demonstrates her extraordinary sensitivity to color, atmosphere, and the behavior of paint allowed to move freely across a surface. Whether evoking the cool depths of a nebula or the warmth of late afternoon light, her paintings achieve a meditative presence that is rare in any era.

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.