There are few artists who were once wrestlers, but then there are even fewer who were also novelists, playwrights and singers. Rosalyn Drexler, who has died aged 98, was all these and more.
Operating in the midst of the 1960s New York downtown scene, with artist peers such as Jim Dine and Andy Warhol, Drexler channelled a life lived well but often precariously, and close to the underbelly of society. The images she culled from magazines, adverts and posters for her pop art collages invariably featured gangsters and their molls, fighting couples and kissing lovers, King Kong and Marilyn Monroe. These photographs were pasted on to canvas and partially painted over with thick blocks of red, green, blue and yellow.
Darker subjects intervened, at odds with the brash palette: references included gender violence, racism, the callousness of corporate America and the nuclear threat. In Love and Violence (1963), Drexler pictures the actors Dean Martin and Geraldine Page mid-embrace from the poster of their just-released film Toys in the Attic, though the image is made more sinister by being isolated amid red oil paint. Money Mad (1988) shows a businessman, a mugger and a homeless person floating against a stark black and brown background with a cascade of dollar bills.
Drexler’s political commentary sometimes came from lived experience. Asked about The Defenders (1983), a collage and acrylic work featuring a shootout between mobsters and cops, she explained how she made the painting for a lawyer in payment for his work defending “someone dear to me” against drug charges.
Rosalyn was born to George Bronznick, a pharmacist, and Hilda (nee 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 for vaudeville. It gave her a taste for the stage and she enrolled at the high school of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H LaGuardia high school) to train as a singer. She then studied arts at Hunter College while taking classes with the New Dance Group, but left after a semester to marry Sherman Drexler, a figurative painter, and the couple moved to Berkeley, California, for Sherman to continue his studies.
Under his influence, Drexler began to make plaster assemblages incorporating metal and found objects, and the couple had a joint exhibition in 1954 at the Courtyard Gallery in Berkeley.
After the couple moved back to New York, Drexler signed up to a judo gym in the Hell’s Kitchen district of Manhattan, which introduced her to wrestling. “It must’ve been close to a circus, because every day there were tumbling dwarfs on a long mat in the window and an old woman who came in to hang by her neck in a tutu with rice powder on her face.”
She soon became part of a travelling, all-female fighting troupe, taking the ring name Rosa Carlo the Mexican Spitfire. “These were tough dames,” Drexler said of her first meeting. “One of them was leaning into a mirror and taking bone fragments out of her gums with a tweezer.” She proved adept at landing fake blows and teasing the crowd. It was the kind of kitsch that Warhol adored, dedicating a series of silkscreens, Album of a Mat Queen (1962), to Drexler as Rosa, the original photographs lifted from a magazine profile on her. Drexler in turn made Warhol promise he would give her one of the works.
After years of working variously as a waitress, cigarette and hatcheck girl to make money, Drexler was now a mother of two, and the wrestling tours gave the family some extra financial security. However, playing theatres and sports halls in the south prior to the end of segregation riled her sense of justice and, unable to continue appearing in such venues, after two years she hung up Rosa Carla’s suit. Several years later she would make the painted collage Is It True What They Say About Dixie (1966), depicting the black-suited men who set dogs on civil-rights protesters.
In 1960 Drexler had her first solo show at the Reuben Gallery in New York, and started attending art happenings at the Judson Memorial Church. That milieu encouraged her to write the first of several plays, Home Movies, which was performed at the avant-garde venue in 1964, before continuing the same year at the off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse. While one critic complained the musical comedy “centres on homosexuality and is not only vulgar but obscene”, it won a Village Voice Obie (off Broadway) award.
Her first novel was published the following year: the New York Times described I Am the Beautiful Stranger as “subtly liberating and wholly original” with its semi-autobiographical protagonist, a teenage girl intent on reinvention who believes “you can do anything as long as it’s not you and you refuse to recognise yourself in the street”.
More books followed, including To Smithereens (1972), which centres on the relationship between an art critic and a wrestler named Rosa, and in 1976, under the pen name Julia Sorel, the novelisation of the film Rocky. In 1973 she was part of a team hired to work on a special of the television comedy Lily, starring Lily Tomlin, which won an Emmy. That decade Drexler also supplemented her income by singing in a nightclub.
A survey exhibition of her art toured the US in 1986, with one critic praising her “tragicomic burlesque of the anxiety and failure of the American dream”. Despite this, exhibitions in the 90s were intermittent until a career revival at the turn of the millennium. In 2000 she had a mini retrospective at Nicholas Davies Gallery, New York, followed by another in 2004 at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?, a full museum touring show, opened at 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 25 November 1926; died 3 September 2025
