Gary Snyder Gallery is pleased to announce Audrey Flack: Sculpture, 1989-2012, an exhibition of sculptures and drawings at 529 West 20th Street. Opening on April 12, 2012, the exhibition is the first since 1993 to focus exclusively on Flack’s sculpture. Twenty of the artist’s meticulously crafted bronze and fiberglass figures will be on view, including two colossal heads, Daphne (1996) and Self-Portrait as St. Teresa (2012)—among Flack’s most dramatic and ambitious works. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Arthur C. Danto.
The exhibition and its accompanying publication offer a retrospective view of Flack’s work since 1989. Best known as a Hyperrealist painter, Flack turned away from painting in 1985. Over the next four years, she produced a limited amount of work. Since then, however, she has created a remarkable body of sculpture focused on reimagining archetypal and mythical images of women. Works in the exhibition such as Medusa (1989) and Sofia (1995) demonstrate Flack’s mastery of various time-honored sculptural traditions, as well as her deep emotional commitment to her subjects. Although steeped in history, her sculptures are undeniably contemporary. All incorporate overt references to popular culture—a plastic die, a giant revolver, or a tube of paint, for example. As a result, Flack’s “mystic archetypes” are instantly accessible to contemporary viewers.
Born in New York in 1931, Audrey Flack 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 National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center.
During the 1970s and 1980s, her work figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Twenty-two Realists (1972, Whitney Museum of American Art), Super Realism (1975-1976, Baltimore Museum of Art), Contemporary American Realism (1981, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), and Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream (1989, Denver Art Museum). 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 (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s (2009, Deutsche Guggenheim), Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism (2010, The Jewish Museum), Narcissus in the Studio: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits (2010-2011, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), and iCON: Consuming the American Image (2011, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University). In September 2011, Flack was named the Estelle Leibowitz Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University. As part the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, the Institute for Women and Art is currently hosting Metamorphoses: Pictures by Audrey Flack, an exhibition of works on paper. A retrospective of Flack’s paintings, Recent Pictures from an Ancient Past will open in May.
Gary Snyder Gallery is pleased to represent Audrey Flack.
Audrey Flack: Sculpture, 1989-2012 will be on view at Gary Snyder Gallery, 529 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, May 19, 2012. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. For more information, please contact Garth Greenan at (212) 929-1351, or email garth@garysnyderart.com.
