15 May 2017

Audrey Flack: Master Drawings from Crivelli to Pollock

Hollis Taggart Galleries

Reviewed by Ellen Pall

Audrey Flack's eye-popping show leaps centuries faster than a speeding bullet, crossing genres with a single bound. In her gigantic painting Fiat Lux, Supergirl and Superman, beaming health and wholesomeness, burst into the blue-washed sky of Rubens's lewd, orgiastic Garden of Love (c. 1632). A Charles le Brun sketch of Dread (c. 1688) gapes aghast at an oddly coquettish de Kooning Woman in Queen of Sheba. Beautiful, doomed Camille Claudel, tears in her anguished eyes, is branded "Crazy BAD Girl BAD GIRL" in glittering script.

Flack has always whirled through media and styles, from her early days as an AbEx painter to fame as a pioneer photorealist, then years of sculpting majestic bronzes (some shown here). In her new work, the Old Masters deliver more shock of the new than does 1960s Pop Art. Flack's always-restless imagination seems more so than ever now. Witty, tormented, endlessly energetic, the show is a shot of adrenaline into the jaded heart.