EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE
MAP OF THE GARDEN – GRAHAM COLLINS, LYNNE DREXLER, LUCY MINK
Opening Reception, Saturday July 5, 6 – 8 pm
On view July 5 – 28 at 79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
For more information please email contact@halseymckay.com
Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to announce Map of the Garden, an intergenerational exhibition of paintings by Graham Collins, Lynne Drexler, and Lucy Mink.
Map of the Garden pursues a constellation of formal inquiries into the relationship between abstraction and representation. Together, these distinct but adjacent practices restage and reinvigorate perennial questions about the scope, meaning, and representational obligations of the painted plane.
Lynne Drexler’s oil paintings from the late 1960s occupy a liminal space between abstraction and landscape. This transitional or non-place is expressed within the compositions themselves through the juxtaposition of flat, geometric forms with more organic masses achieved through stippling and impasto. The gradual mid-century art historical turn away from Abstract Expressionism is here documented not as a break, but a sort of decomposition of pure form.
Lynne Drexler, Walled Shrub, 1968, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
Lucy Mink’s canvases chart a different route through the same territory. These paintings integrate allusions to natural space, into a complex plane mapped by an almost perceptible grid flickering in and out of view in dense foliage. It is a cartographic, Borgesian gesture: collapsing the map and the territory, reflecting the artist’s desire to distribute their attention across the various sensory inputs of eye, mind, and hand.
Lucy Mink, In the Same Area, 2016, Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches
A series of sculptural paintings by Graham Collins is similarly concerned with the impossible relationship between dimensions foregrounded by representational painting and subsequently disavowed (but never successfully disappeared) by gestures of abstraction. Here, reductive canvases form a face, organizing the initial encounter with an extended surface that belies the intricacies of abstraction. The forms are given a literal depth by ceramic supports that extend and aestheticize the traditional frame. But they also suggest a temporal record or an archeological turn. These armatures alter the time of viewing by demanding closer, more extensive attention to blocks of color that twenty-first-century spectators have come to take for granted. In this manner, Collins’ paintings also raise questions about the time of production, art historical time, and the misleading temporality of the abstract gesture at large.
Graham Collins, Wrigley, 2025, Casein on hemp laid on ceramic, 8 x 2 x 3 inches