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Audrey Flack's Marilyn: Still Life,
Vanitas, Trompe l'Oeil
UAMA celebrates the return of a signature painting, Audrey Flack's
monumental Marilyn (1977), after extended loan to the traveling
exhibition WACK!
Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by
the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Audrey Flack
One of three monumental paintings in Audrey Flack's Vanitas
series
(1976-78), Marilyn is among the most significant works of the
artist's
oeuvre. Drawing from the related traditions of still life, vanitas, and
trompe l'oeil, Flack's painting endows material objects with layered
symbolic meaning and expands the possibilities of these historical
genres through innovations in form and content.
Influenced by the work of 17th-century Dutch still life painters, Flack
celebrates the lush textures and colors of the physical world with her
densely packed depictions of illusionistically-rendered objects. As a
vanitas (a still life that alludes to the vanity of worldly pleasures
and to life's transient nature), Marilyn serves as a
commemorative
meditation on the life, death and celebrity of Marilyn Monroe; it
includes both conventional vanitas symbols (an hourglass, a candle) and
modern ones (a photograph, a calendar). Yet, unlike traditional still
lifes, Marilyn also operates as a self-portrait in which Flack
associates her role as artist with the movie star's role in creating a
public persona, and in which she contemplates the passage of time in her
own life through self-referential objects.
In addition, Flack's Marilyn functions within the American
still
life
tradition, particularly that of trompe l'oeil ("trick the eye"), whereby
illusionistic representations of commonplace items create
three-dimensional effects. As a Photorealist, Flack also endeavors to
make objects appear to be real. While the aims of Photorealism are more
conceptual than perceptual, Flack's work shares the trompe l'oeil
interest in the materiality of objects and in investigating the nature
of illusion, reality, and mimesis.
The accompanying works from the UAMA permanent collections are intended
to illustrate the still life, vanitas and trompe l'oeil traditions and
to provoke suggestive connections with Marilyn. While her work
is
rooted
in these genres and their fascination with the material world (and the
ways in which they signify the non-material), Flack contemporizes them
in Marilyn by enlarging the scale, by extending objects beyond
the
picture's border and placing them in unexpected angles and spatial
relationships, and by inserting personal references and symbols.
Susannah Maurer, Assistant Curator
Events:
Visit our Exhibition History page for information on past exhibitions at UAMA. UAMA: (520) 621-7567 
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