Artwork Historical past Information: Georgia O’Keeffe: Reminiscences of Drawings

Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Horns II, c.1949, from Some Reminiscences of Drawings, 1974 © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London 2021. Picture: Anna Arca.

 Georgia O’Keeffe: Reminiscences of Drawings is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition which presents a exceptional assortment of O’Keeffe’s work. The exhibition showcases 21 photogravures of drawings produced by the artist between 1915-1963, reflecting the interval during which she established herself as a significant determine in American Modernism. With no artworks by O’Keeffe held in UK public collections, this exhibition is a uncommon likelihood to see her work in individual exterior the US – the Winchester present is the penultimate cease on the exhibition’s UK tour.                                                                                                                                             

Famend for her distinctive steadiness of abstraction with figuration, in addition to her tenacity in pursuing her revolutionary fashion, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was probably the most necessary artists in twentieth century American artwork. Her iconic works of natural varieties, which embody flowers and bones, surreal abstractions, rural landscapes and concrete cityscapes uniquely captured the expertise of her setting and broke new floor for ladies artists.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Banana Flower, 1933, from Some Reminiscences of Drawings, 1974 © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London 2021. Picture: Anna Arca.

Though finest referred to as a painter, drawing was central to O’Keeffe’s apply. It was her pivotal charcoal abstractions which secured her inaugural exhibitions in 1916-17, organised by the distinguished photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who later turned her husband. She used drawing as a language to evoke necessary moments and feelings – the curve of a flower petal, a desert horizon, the wave of 1’s hair, or the movement of a winding highway.

The works in  Georgia O’Keeffe: Reminiscences of Drawings display the artist’s distinctive fashion, and likewise chart the important thing trajectories and motifs in her apply. The exhibition consists of 9 prints of her earliest charcoal abstracts alongside works initially rendered in pencil and watercolour. These seize topics starting from the artist’s early morning excursions together with her sister to surreal nonetheless lifetime of seashells, banana flowers and animal horns. Collectively, these necessary works mirror a formative assortment that O’Keeffe produced together with her agent and long-term good friend, Doris Bry.

Displayed alongside her drawings, exhibition texts recall the artist’s personal commentary – sourced from a fragmentary however typically poetic textual content she printed alongside the gathering – about why she made these drawings. 

Georgia O’Keeffe: Reminiscences of Drawings is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London. It opens in The Gallery at The Arc, Winchester, on Saturday 26 August and runs till Wednesday 15 November