Georgia O'Keeffe is coming to London! While O'Keeffe is iconic in the US, this exhibition of more than 100 works at the Tate Modern museum marks the first time a showing of such a grand scale has been staged outside the United States.
Georgia O'Keeffe is coming to London! While O'Keeffe is iconic in the US, this exhibition of more than 100 works at the Tate Modern museum marks the first time a showing of such a grand scale has been staged outside the United States.
Blooming vibrant flowers, rolling hills, and the dirt and grit of New Mexico -- US artist Georgia O'Keeffe is in town.
The Tate Modern's new retrospective exhibition on the late US artist includes this large floral study "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1", which sold at auction in 2014 for 44 million US dollars.
That's a record for a female artist, though the description "female artist" is not one O'Keeffe would have liked.
Curators hope this new exhibit will surprise visitors who know the artist for her giant flowers and sun-bleached animal skulls.
"I think she is one of the most important foundational figures of American modernism. She's also -- I think -- someone we might think of as one of the key figures of early modernism anywhere. Her earliest work, her earliest mature work from the mid 19 teens are among the earliest abstract works by any artist," said Tanya Barson, one curator.
Curators hope this new exhibit will surprise visitors who know the artist for her giant flowers and sun-bleached animal skulls.
O'Keeffe, who had her first major exhibition a century ago and died in 1986 aged 98-years-old, had an exceptionally long career.
It took her from her native Wisconsin to bohemian New York - where she absorbed and practiced abstraction and surrealism - and finally to desert New Mexico, whose fiery landscapes inspired her later work.
But she is best known -- through images that adorn countless posters and postcards -- for giant flowers and sinuous, curved abstracts that were often given an erotic interpretation by both male critics and feminist writers.
"The flowers, of course, are the best-known - that's true in the States as well as overseas. But this show makes it so clear that the flowers are just a portion of her creativity, just one small subject in a life of amazing material," said Cody Hartley, director of curatorial affairs, Georgia O'keeffe Museum.
Flowers are certainly prominent in the Tate's exhibition, which has borrowed extensively from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and other North American collections.
The thread that runs through her career -- from the stark abstract charcoals at the start of the exhibition to the aerial images of clouds from above at the end - is a fascination with the American landscape in all its variety.
In New Mexico, images of flowers were replaced by bleached animal skulls, which O'Keeffe rendered beautiful rather than macabre.
"She loved this sense of horizon, of infinity, of wide-open space. And she called this; 'The Faraway'. So the landscape in New Mexico embodied this concept she had that she called 'The Faraway' and I think she thought that that was what was unique about the American landscape this sense of space and expansiveness that she really enjoyed," Barson said.
'Georgia O'Keeffe' runs until October the 30th at Tate Modern art gallery in London, before it moves to Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna, and then the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
