O’Keefe’s First Canadian Solo Exhibit in Over Half a Century
Michelle da Silva
The Vancouver Art Gallery will be presenting Georgia O’Keefe’s first solo exhibit in Canada in over 50 years. The exhibit, Georgia O’Keefe: Nature and Abstraction, will feature landscape paintings and flower studies for which the legendary 20th century American painter and sculptor is most famous.
As the title indicates, the exhibit promises to reveal O’Keefe’s fixation on expressing essential elements through large-scale abstract art by transforming nature into abstraction. When we look at, say, a flower magnified, we begin to notice colors and textures – two details that can be interpreted as essential truths about the flower’s aesthetic. O’Keefe’s landscape paintings focus on the New Mexico landscape of the 1930s and 1940s. She was drawn to the state for many decades and frequently traveled there before buying a ranch north of Albuquerque and calling it her home.
O’Keefe lived from 1887-1986 and has played a major role in American art since the early ‘20s. This particular exhibit will feature her work between 1918 and 1977 as well as photographs of the artist taken by O’Keefe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and renowned American photographer Todd Webb.
O’Keefe’s work was last seen in Vancouver as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2002 exhibit, Places of their Own, which featured the works of O’Keefe alongside Emily Carr, and Frida Khalo. Co-organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and curated by Richard D. Marshall, Georgia O’Keefe: Nature and Abstraction will open at the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 6, 2007 and will run until January 13, 2008. |
