Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack is an American artist from New York known for her sculptures and photorealistic vanitas paintings. Along with creating artwork, she is currently a professor who has taught at several schools throughout the United States. Her photorealistic paintings were among the first to be featured in New York City’s MoMA, beginning the photorealist movement. The highly saturated colors in the paintings and glamorized beauty point to her influence from Baroque Art. These paintings are modern day vanitas, still life that has objects of beauty and constant reminders that death is inevitable (skull, mirrors, makeup, old photos, hourglass).

I chose her work because I love how she takes a genre of still life and recreates it in a more relevant manner. In older vanitas from the 17^th century, most of them were low key whereas Flack does the opposite in hers. The colors are incredibly beautiful along with the use of trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of a photograph. Each object has an important meaning to the piece as a whole, which is an important element to artwork. I think her use of composition is unique as well. She tries to fit the frame around the objects as opposed to painting objects sitting on a table that the viewer can see.