American Masters

Audrey Flack

United States of America born 1931

Audrey Flack was born in New York City, on 30 May 1931. She studied at Yale University, New Haven, in 1952, and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1953, where she was influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her first solo exhibition was in 1959 at the Roko Gallery, New York. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she taught at the Pratt Institute, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her first mature works in the early 1970s drew on family-album photographs and later photographs from magazines of public figures. Her feminist concerns were revealed in the large-scale still-life series, Gray border 1974–75 and Vanitas 1976–77; in these carefully composed Photorealist paintings, Flack manipulated the stereotypes of art and femininity. From 1974 she exhibited with the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York.

From the early 1980s Flack made large-scale indoor and outdoor sculptures based on female deities, imaginary and Classical; an exhibition Saints & Other Angels: The Religious Paintings of Audrey Flack, toured throughout 1986–88. During 1992–93 Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, A Retrospective 1950–1990, travelled to the Wight Art Museum, California; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; The J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville. In 1992 Flack won an international competition to build a monument to Catherine of Braganza, the namesake of the borough, within the Queens West Development Project on the East River. Flack’s work is held in public and private collections. She lives and works in New York.[i]

[i] biographical information sourced from ‘Audrey Flack’ in The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, http://www.groveart.com

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