Audrey Flack, Photorealist Who Painted with Element, Dies at 93


Audrey Flack, a Photorealist artist whose work reproduced tchotchkes, trinkets, images, and extra in painstaking element, died on June 28 in Southampton, New York. She was 93.

Vendor Louis Ok. Meisel, whose New York gallery confirmed Flack’s artwork earlier than she gained illustration with Hollis Taggart, introduced her demise on Monday.

Flack’s artwork knowingly flouted the normal requirements of fine style, blurring the boundaries between excessive and low, portray and pictures, and kitsch and avant-garde. Her work, although not all the time appreciated by critics, who typically scorned it for being out of step with creative tendencies, gained her a cult following that has lately grown a lot wider.

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A smiling woman wearing all black with her hands in her pockets.

“Now 92, Flack is having a second,” Karen Chernick famous in a 2024 ARTnews profile of Flack. “This wasn’t a given, contemplating she’s all the time gone in opposition to the grain. She was figurative when abstraction and minimalism have been ascendant; she used airbrushes when advantageous artists wouldn’t contact them; her nonetheless lifes of lipstick, roses, and beaded necklaces didn’t match the automobiles and vans that her fellow Photorealists have been portray. And when she determined to be a sculptor unexpectedly, her sculptures have been polychrome.”

She died the identical 12 months {that a} memoir, With Darkness Got here Stars, was launched. In the meantime, in October, the Parrish Artwork Museum in Water Mill, New York, is because of mount a survey of her artwork.

Amongst Flack’s most notable collection is her “Vanitas” work, produced between 1976 and 1978. These works, typically finished at a huge scale, allude to the centuries-old custom of vanitas nonetheless lifes, that are meant to remind viewers of their very own mortality, inserting skulls alongside an assortment of objects that always denote the passage of time. Flack’s “Vanitas” work could operate equally, however they’re much more extreme than these of her Outdated Grasp forbears; hers burst with footage of Marilyn Monroe, necklaces, burning candles, contemporary minimize flowers, juicy fruits, pocket watches, and lipsticks.

Some discovered these work to be aesthetically offensive. Critic John Russell, writing within the New York Instances, known as Flack’s work “irredeemably hideous.” Flack appeared to pay that critique no thoughts, persevering with to supply dozens of Photorealist works.

A feminist undercurrent ran by means of Flack’s Photorealist work, as they differed from that of many male Photorealists, who typically targeted on automobiles and the like. However on the time, her work confronted an uncommon conundrum. Some feminine observers felt that it was too extreme and too self-consciously female to completely be thought of feminist. But in time, that debate subsided. Her work at present figures in a gallery dedicated to feminist artwork on the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum in Washington, D.C., which acquired a piece from the “Vanitas” collection in 2022.

A person moving in front of a giant painting of an orange slice, a playing card, a cameo, and much more.

Audrey Flack, Queen, 1976.

Photograph Carmen Jaspersen/image alliance by way of Getty Photos

Audrey Flack was born in New York in 1931. Her dad and mom stored reproductions of Outdated Grasp work round their Washington Heights dwelling; Flack got here to consider these photographs as her “buddies.” However she didn’t assume she would grow to be an artist till she was admitted to Cooper Union in 1950.

On the time, Summary Expressionism was nonetheless thought of the head of art-making by New York critics. Flack disagreed with the “testosterone-fueled aggression and out-of-control consuming” that characterised the lives of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others, and sought a unique path.

As soon as she graduated, Flack attended Yale College for graduate college, learning below artist Josef Albers, after which moved again to New York, the place her buddies ended up together with Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and different painters working in a figurative mode. She started to color from images that she herself took, even utilizing her personal private darkroom, constructed within the lavatory of her studio, to develop these photographs.

In her memoir, she recounted having acquired a postcard from curator Marcia Tucker within the Nineteen Seventies that featured Seventeenth-century Spanish artist Luisa Roldán’s sculpture of the Virgin of Hope of Macarena. Flack didn’t know Roldán, an essential Baroque sculptor, had produced the piece till she visited the Seville church the place it’s housed.

“I didn’t care that this artwork was dismissed as lower-class kitsch,” Flack mentioned of that piece. Her personal work, too, appeared to run in opposition to masculinist expectations for what artwork must be.

A giant sculpture of a winged figure holding a feather.

Audrey Flack’s Recording Angel (2006), exterior the Schermerhorn Symphony Middle in Nashville, Tennessee.

Photograph Raymond Boyd/Getty Photos

In the course of the Nineteen Eighties, Flack felt she had reached a useless finish along with her work and paused art-making for a pair years. Then she returned as a sculptor, creating monumental works depicting goddesses with flowing robes and lithe figures.

Flack heralded these works as a method ahead for artwork writ giant. “I do return to the ancients and to Neoclassicism, however my work may be very modern,” Flack informed the New York Instances. “It’s postpostmodern.”

Towards the tip of the profession, she tacked on one other “post-” to her work, creating work that she labeled “Put up-Pop-Baroque” that featured accumulations of horses, textual content, fantastical beings, and extra, all cramped collectively. “I like bringing again the masters,” she mentioned.

When Flack was profiled by ARTnews, she mentioned she had extra work coming—and that these new work can be laborious to disregard. “They’re not going to be over-the-sofa work,” she mentioned.

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