On Thursday September 8, 2011, Betty Cuningham Gallery will open the season with Greg Drasler: On the Lam, an exhibition of new paintings and his third solo show at the gallery. An opening reception for the artist will be held on September 8th, from 6 – 8 PM.

Drasler, in these highly polished uncanny paintings, constructs the elsewhere and disruptions of travel as if reinventing the wheel. With auto interiors, patterns and suspended objects, the manifold directions of the imagination is a back seat driver steering into bursts of symbolic coincidence. The objects have the capacity of vehicles and the vehicles are all interior. Littered with cameras, trailers, books, tents and a ski lift, the paintings remain unusually vacant yet preoccupied. This pile up of instruments, tools, patterns and apparel accumulates and reads as words in a sentence, a visual sentence, which is the painting.

Taking its title from the largest painting in the show the exhibition insinuates encampment as a destination. On the Lam (70×160 inches) is crowded with trailers, tents and wagons that attract with a variety of doors, windows, vents and flaps. In the constructed panoramic sky, complete with camp fire plume, hovers a bicycle wheel, either spun out or loosened from its sprockets. In the place below, where the rubber hits the road, the painting gives us means-to-move and places-to-be.

Born in Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received a BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. He has exhibited regularly in the US since the mid 80’s. Widely collected privately, Drasler’s work can be seen in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc., New York; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, New York and Thurston Twigg-Smith, Honolulu, HI.

Drasler has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993 and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. He is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute and has also taught at Princeton University.

The current exhibition will remain on view through October 15, 2011. And it is accompanied by an on-line catalogue at www.bettycuninghamgallery.com (coming shortly).