Audrey Flack is an American photo-realist painter, print-maker, and sculptor.
Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. Her early work was abstract; one such painting paid tribute to Franz Kline. But gradually, Flack became a New Realist and finally a photo-realist, in reaction to the abstract art movement. Author Graham Thompson wrote “One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photo-realist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.” She later claimed she found the photo-realist movement too restricting, and now gains much of her inspiration from baroque art.
The ironic kitsch themes in her early work influenced Jeff Koons. A pioneer of Photo-realism and a nationally recognized painter and sculptor, Ms. Flack’s work is 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 Museum of Art in Canberra, Australia. She was the first photo-realist painter to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
Tags: AUDREY FLACK, CHUCK CLOSE, JEFF KOONS