Flack, Audrey (1931- ), American painter and sculptor. Flack first gained recognition in the 1960s as one of the earliest practitioners of photorealism. This precisely realistic style of painting relies on photographs of scenes, rather than the scenes themselves, as the model for its images. Photorealist paintings are typically impersonal and detached; in contrast, Flack’s paintings are remarkable for their emotionally evocative content.

In the 1960s Flack painted a series of works based on news photographs. The paintings memorialize current events—for example, the assassination of United States president John F. Kennedy in Kennedy Motorcade (1964, private collection) and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in War Protest March (1968, Capricorn Gallery, Bethesda, Maryland). Flack achieved a breakthrough in style and technique while working on Farb Family Portrait (1969-1970, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts).

With this painting, she began to use color slides that she projected onto the canvas while she was painting it, a system that enabled her to fill in patches of luminous color with an airbrush and eliminated the need to draw outlines around forms. In her Vanitas series of the 1970s she employed this method to create photorealist still lifes that are jam-packed with playfully arranged, brightly colored objects.

For example, Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977, private collection) depicts glamorous photographs of American motion-picture star Marilyn Monroe amid a still life of make-up kits, costume jewelry, a childhood snapshot, an hourglass, and overripe fruit. Many of these objects draw on earlier still-life traditions in suggesting the passage of time and the fleeting pleasures of the material world. At the same time, Flack’s paintings have a distinctly personal, emotional, and feminine perspective that defies both the traditions of still-life painting and the deliberately banal subject matter of most contemporary photorealist paintings.

In the early 1980s Flack painted a series of works depicting modern-day "saints" or "goddesses." She continued this theme when she began making sculptures in the late 1980s. Her monumental statues of invented goddesses are modeled after real, rather than ideal, women’s bodies. Their heroic poses are inspired by classical statues from ancient Rome and Greece, as well as by 19th-century civic sculptures that Flack admires, and they appear to celebrate the courage and heroism of women. Flack’s commissions for large public sculptures include Gateway to the City of Rock Hill (1991, Rock Hill, North Carolina) and Islandia: Goddess of the Healing Waters (1988, New York City Technical College, Brooklyn).

Audrey Flack was born in New York City. She graduated from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City, in 1951, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1952 (where she studied with American abstract painter Josef Albers), and studied at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1953. Flack initially experimented with abstraction but soon committed herself to realism, to which she has remained loyal despite changes in medium and content.