"Audrey Flack Paints a Picture" Exhibition
Gary Snyder Project Space
This event has ended.
GARY SNYDER Project Space presents Audrey Flack Paints a Picture, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs, and ephemera at 250 West 26th Street. The exhibition is the first to examine in-depth the process that led to such Hyperrealist masterpieces as Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas) (1977-1978) and Marilyn: Golden Girl (1978), both featured in the exhibition. The exhibition also includes twenty of the unique photographic “drawings” that Flack used to create these and other works between 1971 and 1983, as well as the actual objects used in staging the still lifes. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring an essay by Jeanne Hamilton.
The exhibition’s premise was inspired by Robert Goodnough’s photo-essay “Pollock Paints a Picture,” first published in the May 1951 issue of Art News. In his essay, Goodnough illustrated the step-by-step transformation of Pollock’s Number 4, 1950 from an expanse of blank canvas into a teeming mass of yellow and white paint. In the same vein, Audrey Flack Paints a Picture invites viewers to experience first-hand the development of the artist’s iconic still-life paintings from their inception as diminutive tabletop “sculptures” into monumental Technicolor canvases.
In preparation for her paintings, the artist took dozens of photographs, meticulously arranging and rearranging the still life to obtain the desired composition. Her paintings were rarely the result of a single photographic image; instead, they were amalgamations of several, many of which were taken years apart. Thus, in Flack’s work, the camera functions as a kind of “sketchbook”—an aspect of her artistic process that Audrey Flack Paints a Picture examines in great detail.
Born in New York in 1931, Audrey Flack, 79, is an internationally recognized painter and sculptor. Her work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, Australia.
During the 1970s and 1980s, her work figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as: Twenty-two Realists (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972), Super Realism (Baltimore Museum of Art, 1975-1976), Contemporary American Realism (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1981), and Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream (Denver Art Museum, 1989), among others. In 1992, her work was the subject of a traveling retrospective organized by the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
Most recently, her work appeared in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007) and Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s (Deutsche Guggenheim, 2009). Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism at The Jewish Museum, September 12, 2010-January 30, 2011.
[Image: Audrey Flack "Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas)" (1977-1978) oil over acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 16, 2010 to November 06, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-23 from 18:00 to 20:00