"Painted in her trademark glitter and flocking on canvas, Nancy Drew’s paintings embrace and amp up the notion of "retinal art" by making it vibrate with familiar if unexpected associations. Made with a view to confecting eye candy for the 21st Century, Drew’s paintings make a large claim for their own uniqueness in today's contemporary artistic practice.
The Artists Series is made up of portraits of the works of some of her "favorite 20th century artists," many of which she "grew up with" and "visited regularly at the MOMA" as a child with her father. Renditions in her own materials of paintings by Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, Nancy Drew’s paintings function less as ironical critique than as artistic cover versions of some of the biggest artistic hits of the 20th century.
More John Coltrane’s "My Favorite Things" than The Slits’ "I Heard It Through The Grapevine," Drew’s glitter and flock versions of the celebrated, canonical paintings of her favorite Abstract Expressionists are more homages done in the spirit of celebration than deconstructions of a picked-over modernist tradition. Nonetheless, Nancy Drew's artistic transpositions can't help but turn the high seriousness of their sources on their ear. Feminized and beautified beyond instant recognition, Nancy Drew's works stand on their own as highly original links between a much abused, largely unrecovered past and a present generous with rich painterly possibilities.”
