Mary_Reviews

”...Living in society she (Dritschel) is determined by the experience she possesses which is generally filtered through a complex interaction between herself and the expectancies of the world. Thus her iconography, themes, visual representations are held together in an internal and external process that in its turn is always ambivalent.”

-- Work of Art, A means of Reflection About Women...Sheila Leirner

“Mary Dritschel isn’t just content to make a statement out of ordinary non-art materials: she likes to go as far as she can. What comes out is sculpture made of stuffed soxes, men’s shorts and surgical gloves painted white, reaching out from the wall (called ”Bed of Males”). Beyond the initial pun, these are all well handled soft forms exploring materials frequently used by, touched by women in the home: embroidery hoops and items from the laundry basket. Her ideas are satirically feminist...”

-- Mimi Crossley, ”Art in the Galleries” - Houston Post

”Mary Dritschel’s ”Painting off the Wall” made of cardboard boxes is the most eye-pleasing part of the Texas Sculpture Symposium in the Blue Star Art Space.”

-- Don Goddard, ”Sculpture’s Cutting Edge” - Express-News, San Antonio, Texas

”Mary Dritschel is an American artist who lives in São Paulo and has been very active as an avant-garde and feminist artist. This time she showed a huge, beautiful and very effective wall sculpture made of painted and cutout cardboard boxes. Not only is it a very good work of art, but it also demonstrated that it is possible to make high-quality art with cheap and easily obtainable materials... something important in our underdeveloped countries.”

-- Marc Berkowitz, ”S‹o Paulo Bienal-Miles of Paintings, Miles of Sculptures”-Art News

”Mary Dritschel has the last word, no matter whether she’s nailed, screwed, or stomped into place. Her sculptures carry on a talking-back dialogue with the mythical New York male-dominated art world...her sculptures take the viewer on a hilarious trip into the survival techniques of the female artist. Dritschel’s art is a pure celebration of a woman's cheeky tenacity.”
-- Glenna Park, ”Up Yours Buddy-Stuff It” - Contemporary Art/Southeast

”Metaphors, fantasies and similes comprise the sexual, political and aesthetic statements by Mary Dritschel. (She) evidences a knowledge and control of craft and a fine sensitivity to shape and materials. Similar to artifacts displayed in museums, or factual evidence, Dritschel’s ”cool” and calculated well-made objects of passion, caring, and beauty shock and amuse the viewer with their blatant messages, forcing one to enter her world, a world seen from the unique and formerly repressed perspective of a woman dealing with sexual fantasies.”
-- Hedy O’Beil, Arts magazine

...a multitude of anxieties is the diversity of her work. One finds this reflected in her objects, drawings, writings (the base of her creative process), installations, exercises with photography and Xerox, her play on the ambiguous and in her research of new materials in her studio. Her art fascinates us because of its unsettling character, its intelligence and by its use of feminine references. The condition of a woman, her body and her circumstances constitute a partial viewpoint in her work...it is always broached with extreme objectivity. At the same time, her sense of humor, her effusive vitality, appears to conflict with what one might perceive as ”the peculiar meek property of the fragile sex.”

-- Aracy Amaral, Estado do S‹o Paulo. ”O Cotidiano Feminino Transformado em Arte”