Audrey flack biography timeline book
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Audrey Flack is an internationally acclaimed painter, sculptor, and a pionjär of photorealism. Ms. Flack enjoys the distinction of being the first Photorealist painter whose work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection. Among many major museums around the world, her work also resides in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Butler Institute of American Art, National Gallery of Australia, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Additionally, she is the first woman artist, along with Mary Cassatt, to be included in Janson’s History of Art text.
Among her public commissions are Monumental Gatewayto the City of Rock Hill in South Carolina, consisting of four twenty-foot high bronze figures on granite pedestals; Veritas et Justitia, a fifteen foot high figure of Justice for the Thirteenth Judicial Courthouse in Tampa, Florida;
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Summary of Audrey Flack
Following an early, and comparatively successful, flirtation with Abstract Expressionism, Audrey Flack turned to figurative self-portraiture, a change in direction that was a response in part to challenging personal circumstances. Once her domestic situation had improved, however, Flack moved away from the 'self' and addressed herself to the object world using the copying, tracing, and enlarging methods associated with the aesthetics of Photorealism. Flack's new-found success was such that she became a highly revered and established figure within the art establishment. But rather than try and repeat her greatest triumphs, Flack turned to sculpture as a means of exploring issues of history and female representations, chiefly through the three-dimensional figure of the classical goddess. She later returned to two-dimensional work using painting and printmaking in her quest to rework the heroic - post-modern - female figure.
Accomplishments
- Moving away fro
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In the early 1970s, the artist Audrey Flack traveled to the Basílica de la Macarena in Seville, Spain, to see a carved-wood statue called Macarena Esperanza, a polychrome depiction of a weeping Virgin Mary adorned with jewels, crystal tears, and false eyelashes. Flack is Jewish, but she was no less overcome by the Macarena’s sorrowful splendor: Here was a mother shedding tears for her child—Flack could relate—but she was also regal, grand, beautiful. Flack photographed the statue and, once back home in New York, made several paintings based on her pictures, capturing each resplendent detail in high definition.
One of those paintings, Macarena of Miracles (1971), was included in the 1972 Whitney Biennial. Critics thought Flack was poking fun at the statue’s kitsch—that she added the cartoonish tears as some ironic commentary on femininity. They loved it. When Flack clarified and said that, actually, the work was incredibly earnest, the critics withdrew their praise and labeled