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Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932. Oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2014.35. Photograph by Edward C. Robison III. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Bildrecht, Wien, 2016

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Georgia O’Keeffe

07.12.2016 - 26.03.2017

Georgia O’Keeffe, Oriental Poppies, 1927, Oil paint on canvas, 76,2 x 101,9, The collection of the Frederick R.Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Museum purchase 1937. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Bildrecht, Wien, 2016Georgia O’Keeffe, Music – Pink and Blue No.1, Oil on canvas, Collection Barney A. Ebsworth. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Bildrecht, Wien, 2016Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, Night, 1928-1929, Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska Art Association, Thomas C. Woods Memorial. Photo © Sheldon Museum of Art © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Bildrecht, Wien, 2016Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Cross with Stars and Blue, 1929, Private collection © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Bildrecht, WienGeorgia O’Keeffe, Black door with Red, 1954, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Bildrecht, WienGeorgia O’Keeffe, Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Bildrecht, WienGeorgia O’Keeffe, From the Faraway, Nearby, 1937, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Foto: © BKP/ The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Malcolm Varon © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Bildrecht, WienAlfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.19 © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a founder of American Modernism and a pioneer as an artist. The opportunities to see O’Keeffe in Europe are rare: her paintings are distributed around the leading US collections, where they have gained an iconic status. This retrospective now provides a view for the first time in Austria of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, which encompasses seven decades. Among the exhibits is also Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), the most expensive picture by a woman artist ever auctioned.


 

O’Keeffe debuted in 1916, exactly a hundred years ago, in an artistic circle dominated by men surrounding her later husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The exhibition starts off with her lesser known early work, with its close affinity to Wassily Kandinsky’s “spiritual” abstraction. O’Keeffe’s monumental flower pictures of the 1920s, which under the influence of the writings of Sigmund Freud evoked strongly sexualising interpretations, are among her most popular subjects. Formal specifics like the sharp focus, the cutting-edge delineation and the close-up are a visual demonstration of O’Keeffe’s innovative transposition of photographic strategies into painting. The show underlines this artistic dialogue with a selection of photographs by Alfred, Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. O’Keeffe’s almost abstract late landscapes inspired by the bleak, endless desert of New Mexico embody the creation of “The Great American Thing”, a specific American art, and anticipate the art trends of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The exhibition accentuates O’Keeffe’s singular position, assumed through her bridge-building between European Modernism and American post-war abstraction, also through her constant mediation between a relationship with nature and abstraction, between organic and geometric, feeling and de-personalisation.

 

The exhibition was organized by Tate Modern in cooperation with the Bank Austria Kunstforum and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

curated by

Heike Eipeldauer

Tanya Barson (Tate Modern)

Cooperation

Tate Modern

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

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James Welling

05/05/2017 - 16/07/2017

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Martin Kippenberger

08/09/2016 - 27/11/2016

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