Ars longa, vita brevis cautions the banner above Audrey Flack in her recent Self-Portrait with Flaming Heart (2022). The formidable nonagenarian artist, whose art career and life have in fact been enviably long (especially compared to the crowd of Abstract Expressionists she once rolled with), presents us with a Sacred Heart set afire. If one of her idols, Albrecht Dürer, could paint himself as Christ, then surely she can cast herself as the Virgin Mary, as she does here with her Star of David pendant symbolizing that she is also a Jewish mother. A crosshatched halo crowns her head and two Pre-Raphaelite women flank her in a sky of Marian blue, like saints.
Flack has always experimented with self-portraiture and, among other things, is known for fusing the personal with the art historical and the present with the past. She dubs her recent work (including this self-portrait) her “Post-Pop Baroque” period, in which she appropriates images of pop-cultural figures like Elizabeth Taylor and Superman, and places them in opulent surrounds.
Audrey Flack, Self-Portrait with Flaming Heart, 2022
Now 92, Flack is having a moment. This wasn’t a given, considering she’s always gone against the grain. She was figurative when abstraction and minimalism were ascendant; she used airbrushes when fine artists wouldn’t touch them; her still lifes of lipstick, roses, and beaded necklaces didn’t match the cars and trucks that her fellow Photorealists were painting. And when she decided to be a sculptor all of a sudden, her sculptures were polychrome.
