Dru

Tierra del Sol Gallery Presents
DRU March 21 – April 25, 2026
Opening Reception March 21, 6 – 8pm

Tierra del Sol Gallery is proud to present DRU, the second major survey of long-time program artist Dru McKenzie. For more than 25 years, McKenzie has developed a singular body of work in her signature visionary, playful, and inimitable style. This retrospective traces her evolving use of line and color across a range of genres, including still life, portraiture, and tableaux, each pushed toward extremes of stylization. What emerges is a truly distinctive mastery of drawing and mark-making.

Drawing from source material as varied as National Geographic and fashion magazines, the works gathered in this exhibition illuminate McKenzie’s rich personal iconography, often rendered in bold graphic lines and saturated planes of color. Forms float within fields of vibrating marks, thick paint, and washes, while other compositions depict space as an abstract intersection of lines and rectangles. Familiar smiles appear on animals across time, and McKenzie arranges her figures into exuberant yet disciplined leaps through the air.

Line remains the constant through all of McKenzie’s work. Her practice carries echoes of Jean Dubuffet’s totemic compositions as well as the colorful, poster-like works of Henri Matisse. Even when working in acrylic, with graphic qualities that bring to mind Bill Traylor, McKenzie renders her figures as symbols: glyph-like forms that circulate throughout her studio practice with ritualistic intensity. Her signature, almost always written as DRU in capital letters and often repeated three times, functions as a pictograph itself, suggesting a primordial slippage between drawing and writing.

DRU stands as a testament to a lifelong creative engagement with the world, a marvel of the possibilities of drawing, and a triumph of personal vision. This major retrospective is on view at Tierra del Sol Gallery in West Hollywood from March 21 through April 25, 2026.

Dru McKenzie was born in 1957 and joined Tierra del Sol in 1998. She has had solo exhibitions at Tierra del Sol Gallery in Los Angeles and at 24 Hour Gallery in Pasadena, California. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions at Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles; Berenberg Gallery in Boston; Gensler in Santa Monica; Bridge Gallery at Los Angeles City Hall; Da Vinci Gallery at Los Angeles City College; and Art Enables in Washington, D.C. Her work was included in Space Is the Place, a group exhibition curated by Alison Saar. McKenzie was also featured in Doug Harvey’s Artsy article, “10 L.A. Artists Whose Work You Probably Don’t Know—but Should.”