Internationally acclaimed painter and sculptor Audrey Flack died at age 93 in East Hampton, New York, on Friday, June 28, resulting from a sudden aortic dissection, her daughter Hannah Marcus and former gallerist Louis Okay. Meisel confirmed.
Flack is remembered for her impactful beginnings in Summary Expressionism and as a pioneering feminine member of the Photorealist motion of the late Sixties via the Seventies. She was born in 1931 to an immigrant Jewish household in Brighton Seaside, and spent a piece of her childhood shifting round New York Metropolis, ultimately touchdown up in Washington Heights. In a 2021 podcast interview with Hyperallergic’s Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and her shut buddy, artist Sharon Louden, Flack revealed that she was thought of a “unhealthy” child for her hyperactivity and poor grades in school, however ultimately gained a repute as the category artist, which “was the one factor that put the world to ensure that [her].” She went on to graduate from the Excessive Faculty of Music and Artwork and was accepted into the fantastic arts program at Cooper Union, the place she studied earlier than being supplied a scholarship to check artwork at Yale College.
In her early profession, Flack was invested in Summary Expressionism, hanging across the like-minded artists who patronized the Cedar Tavern (up till an disagreeable interplay with a drunk Jackson Pollock left her disillusioned, as she advised Hyperallergic within the aforementioned podcast) whereas working odd jobs throughout college and postgrad. After diverging from the Cedar Tavern crowd and the darkish habits that adopted them, she started incorporating extra figuration into her work over time and enrolled within the Artwork College students League underneath the tutelage of Robert Beverly Hale, a famend teacher of creative anatomy.
Flack started portray from images taken from information clippings. Some take into account her 1964 “Kennedy Motorcade” as the primary portray of the Photorealism motion. She then started portray from her personal pictures, together with snapshots of her two younger daughters, along with glistening depictions of shiny lipstick tubes, beaded necklaces, mirrors, and bottled cosmetics or perfumes. She gained consideration for her feminized and feminist Vanitas compositions — nonetheless lifes rife with symbolic objects — and fixated on rendering gentle by projecting her images onto huge canvases.
Regardless of their recognition and inclusion in numerous museum collections, Flack’s Photorealist works have been thought of polarizing in a profoundly sexist surroundings and trade, and have been at one level dismissed as no higher than mechanical replica. Flack recalibrated her pursuits within the Nineteen Eighties for the next 30 years, devoting her follow to sculpture, focusing totally on highly effective ladies and goddesses throughout totally different religions, histories, and mythologies. Flack’s bronzes seem in numerous public areas, together with “Veritas et Justitia” (2007) on the George Edgecomb Courthouse in Tampa, Florida, and “The Recording Angel” (2006) in Nashville, Tennessee.
Flack just lately reunited along with her affinity for portray, embarking on a brand new fashion she dubbed “Publish-Pop Baroque,” weaving collectively dramatic and dynamic baroque material with modern matters and societal points. Her most up-to-date endeavors within the new fashion have been offered in a solo exhibition from March via April this yr at Hollis Taggart Gallery in Manhattan.
“We mourn the lack of a real creative legend who left an indelible mark on the historical past of American artwork,” mentioned gallerist Hollis Taggart in an announcement to Hyperallergic. “Audrey’s boundless creativity outlined her profession, spanning seven a long time, always innovating and looking for new methods of expression, from early years of Summary Expressionism, to mid-century figuration, to photorealism, and culminating in her last chapter of ‘Pop Baroque.’”
Shut buddy and artist Sharon Louden advised Hyperallergic over the cellphone that Flack was “a robust lady who not solely wasn’t afraid to talk her thoughts, however solely spoke the reality” through the ’50s and ’60s, and that she had been “constant in dwelling her values all through her complete life,” which in flip taught [Louden] to do the identical.
“Flack had a humor and pure activism in her life and work that gave me the arrogance to talk my thoughts regardless of how others react,” Louden left off.
The late artist is survived by her two daughters, Hannah and Melissa. She is preceded in demise by her husband, Robert Marcus, who handed away in Could. An exhibition of Flack’s work is slated to open in October on the Parrish Artwork Museum in Southampton, New York.