by There are only a few artists who were once wrestlers, but then there are fewer novels, playwrights and singers. Rosalyn Drexler, who died at the age of 98, was all of this and more.
In the mid -1960s in the New York city center with scene of artists such as Jim Dine and Andy Warhol, Drexler lived a life well, but often precarious and close to the lower abdomen of society. The pictures that they said from magazines, advertisements and posters for their Pop -Art collages showed gangsters and their minors, fought couples and küssel lovers, King Kong and Marilyn Monroe. These photos were inserted on canvas and partially painted with thick blocks made of red, green, blue and yellow.
Dark subjects intervened in contradiction to the ThreeD Palette: the references included gender -specific violence, racism, the privacy of the corporate America and the nuclear threat. In Love and Violence (1963), Drexler puts actors Dean Martin and Geraldine Page Mid-Embrace from the poster of their just published film toys in the attic, although the image becomes darker by isolating in the middle of red oil paint. Money Mad (1988) shows a businessman, a Mugger and a homeless person who hovers in front of a strong black and brown background with a cascade of dollar bills.
Drexler’s political comment sometimes came from the experience lived. When asked about The Defenders (1983), a collage and acrylic work with a shooting between Mobstern and police officers, she explained how she defended the painting for a lawyer for his work as a defending champion “someone who planned” against drug accusations.
Rosalyn was born as the son of George Bronznick, a pharmacist, and Hilda (born Sherman), both children of Jewish-Russian immigrants, in the Bronx, New York City. As a child, she devoured the art posters that came with the newspaper, but she also shared her family’s love of Varieté. There was a taste on the stage and she wrote down at the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello h Laguardia High School) as a singer. Afterwards she studied art at Hunter College, when she took lessons at the new dance group, but after a semester to marry Sherman Drexler, a figurative painter, and the couple moved to Berkeley, California, so that Sherman continued to continue his studies.
Under his influence, Drexler began to contain plaster assemblies with metal and find objects, and the couple had a joint exhibition in the Courtyard Gallery in Berkeley in 1954.
After the couple had withdrawn to New York, Drexler registered in a judo fitness studio in the Hell’s Kitchen district of Manhattan, which she presented to the wrestling. “It must have been near a circus, because every day dwarfs plunged on a long mat in the window and an old woman who came in to hang on her neck in a tutu with a rice powder.”
She soon became part of a traveler, purely female fighting force and recorded the ring name Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire. “These were hard ladies,” said Drexler about her first meeting. “One of them leaned into a mirror and took bone fragments from their gums with a tweezer.” She proved to be skillful in landing false blows and teasing the crowd. It was the kind of kitsch that Warhol revered and drexler as Rosa a series of Silkscreens, album by a Mat Queen (1962), devoted to them when the original photos were lifted from a magazine profile. Drexler in turn promised Warhol that he would give her one of the works.
After Drexler had worked as a waitress, cigarette and Hatsche girl for years to make money, he was now the mother of two children, and the wrestling tours gave the family additional financial security. The playing of theaters and sports halls in the south before the end of the separation solved their sense of justice and, after two years, could not appear in such places. After two years she put on Rosa Carla’s suit. A few years later, she would do the painted collage, it is true what they say about Dixie (1966), and shows the black men who put dogs on civilian laws.
In 1960, Drexler had her first solo show in the Reuben Gallery in New York and began art in the Judson Memorial Church. The milieu encouraged her to write the first of several pieces, Home Movies, which was listed at the Avantgarde event location in 1964 before continued in the off-broadway Provincetown Playhouse in the same year. While a critic is about the musical comedy “turns on homosexuality and is not only vulgar, but obscene,” he won a village voice Obie (Off Broadway).
Her first novel was published the following year: The New York Times described, I am the beautiful stranger as “subtle liberating and completely original” with his semi-autobiographical protagonist, a young girl who intends to reinvention, who believes “you can do something as long as you and her refuse to recognize yourself on the street”.
Further books, including Smitheens (1972), who focused on the relationship between an art critic and a wrestler named Rosa and in 1976 under the pseudonym Julia Sorel, the Romanization of the Film Rocky, focuses. In 1973 she was part of a team who worked on a special of the television comedy Lily with Lily Tomlin who won an Emmy. This decade, Drexler has also added her income by singing in a night club.
A survey exhibition of her art toured in 1986 in the United States. A critic praised her “tragicomic burlesque about the fear and the failure of the American dream”. Nevertheless, the exhibitions in the 90s were revived to a career to revive until the millennium. In 2000 she had a mini retrospective in Nicholas Davies Gallery, New York, followed by another in 2004 in the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Rosalyn Drexler: Whoever believes it, a full museum touring show that opened in the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2016. In 2018, her gallery Garth Greenan presented a show of her early work at Frieze Masters in London.
Sherman died in 2014 and her daughter Rachel died in 2010. Rosalyn is survived by her son Daniel.
• Rosalyn Drexler, artist and writer, born on November 25, 1926; died on September 3, 2025
