DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack was a pioneer painter in the photorealism of the late 1960's and early 1970's. She revived the still life genre with her brilliantly tactile compositions that challenged standard views of modernism by insisting on more color, form, image, space, and meaning at a time when formal reduction was popular. Flack, painting from projected slide images, investigated the possibilities of illusionism while retaining an iconography rich in personal symbolic meaning. Flack's photographs, often identical to or variations of her super real paintings, address themes of femininity and womanhood, morality and transcendence, and the transitoriness of life. A Course in Miracles, titled after a book on meditation, transforms Baba, an Indian philanthropist, into an icon of spiritual significance. The rainbow of spiritual light unifies Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Einstein's scientific and philosophical thought. Since 1983, Flack has worked primarily as a sculptor, creating larger-than-life bronze goddess figures and instilling the vitality and independence associated with the male in western culture in her modern interpretation of female power and divinity.
