A photo-realist painter of popular images, Audrey Flack was committed to the idea that the greatest art is that which can be understood by the masses of people. She had major influence in the revitalizing of still-life subjects in the 1970s and 1980s, and unlike most photo-realist painters was emotionally committed to her subject matter. She regarded emotional commitment as part of being feminine, something of which she is proud.
Flack was one of the first painters to acknowledge that she referred to photographs when painting and would project photos from slides onto her canvases, painting over the images. She began working in a representational style when Abstract Expressionism was dominating the art world. She is especially committed to subjects of strong-minded women, eschewing oppression, and openly associated with feminine objects such as finger-nail polish and china cups.
Flack was raised in Washington Heights, New York and graduated from Cooper Union in 1951. Josef Albers, then the new chair of the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, actively recruited her as part of his attempt to upgrade the quality of the students in that department. But determined to be a realist, she fought with Albers continuously, rebelling against his aggressive and exclusively taught theories of hard-edged geometric expression. She earned a B.F.A. degree from Yale, and some said it was only by armed truce with Albers that she graduated.
Seeking strong, realistic anatomy training, she enrolled in the Arts Student League where she studied with Robert Beverly Hale and developed a unique figural style, often painting with Philip Pearlstein. She openly made fun of what she regarded as the male chauvinist, groupie behavior of the New York School of abstract-expressionist painters. She exhibited in the 1950s and often the only representational artist in the group, was perceived as hopelessly middle class in her appeal.
In the early 1960s, Flack began to copy black and white photographs, and her painting "Kennedy Motorcade," was the first color photo from which she copied. Because this photo so closely resembled the photo, she was much criticized by other photo-realist paintings. However, she countered that photos were just another aspect of reality.
By 1970, she was projecting color slides onto her canvases and began to do what became her trademark work, large-scale sensuous, vivid figure and portraits paintings and complex still lifes with gambling and religious iconography. Her work, often done with airbrush, is rarely smaller than six feet in height and width, because of the size, confrontational subject matter, and bright colors was often shocking to viewers.