Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack
(born May 30, 1931)
is an American artist.

Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.

Photo of Audrey Flack by Annie Schlechter, 2024

Audrey Flack, *Queen*, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 80 × 80 in. (203.2 × 203.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Louis K. and Susan P. Meisel, 2022.11.5

Audrey Flack, *Abstract Force: Homage to Franz Kline,* 1951–52.

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BY GRACE EDQUIST (Mar 2024)

“I’m usually way ahead of the times,” Flack, a sprightly 92, tells me when I visit her home studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in January.

She leapt from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to photorealism in the 1970s to public sculpture in the 1980s.

She has been a teacher, a writer, a musician, and, crucially, a mother to two girls. When I visit, she is about to publish a memoir, With Darkness Came Stars (out now from Penn State University Press), which traces her sweeping career as an artist as well as the nitty-gritty of her personal life, including an abusive first marriage and the challenges of parenting a child with autism. She was also preparing to stage a show at Hollis Taggart gallery, where 16 new works bring together the many aspects of her remarkable life. (Her work will also be the subject of a Parrish Art Museum exhibition this fall.) read HERE

Audrey Flack, *Banana Split Sundae*, 1980, color screenprint and inkless intaglio over offset lithograph on paper, image: 18 ¹⁄₈ x 24 ¹⁄₈ in. (45.9 x 61.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Democratic National Committee, 1981.174.3

Only in the darkest moments of our lives do the brightest stars appear.
An artist, mother, teacher, and rebel, Audrey Flack is counted among the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In With Darkness Came Stars, she recounts and reflects upon a life fully lived.
Flack came up in the New York art scene when the city was fast becoming a world arts center.

She had a studio in the Bowery and frequented the Cedar Tavern, where she rubbed elbows with Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

After leaving that scene and starting a family, she spearheaded Photorealist painting, alongside the likes of Chuck Close and Richard Estes.

Flack has lived a remarkable life, successfully navigating a vibrant and virulently sexist art world, escaping an abusive marriage, and reshaping the rules of art creation in the middle of the twentieth century–all while raising two children, one with severe autism. Her story is full of strife and striving, but as an artist, Flack has always been able to find the beauty in it.
>> buy it HERE

cover artwork: Audrey Flack, A Brush with Destiny, 2023.