Audrey Flack, a New York artist who leaped from abstract expressionism to photorealism to large-scale sculpture, exploring the varied experiences of women while drawing inspiration from Greek mythology, a Spanish Madonna, and the tchotchkes and tea cups that give shape to daily life, died June 28 at a hospital in Southampton, N.Y. She was 93.
The cause was complications from an aortic tear, said her daughter Hannah Marcus. Ms. Flack, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, spent most of her seven-decade career swimming against the art-world tide.
She embraced realist painting when abstraction was in vogue, wielded an airbrush when fellow artists considered the commercial tool “immoral,” and helped define the photorealist movement in the late 1960s and ’70s, when she was the only prominent woman in a group of painters that included Chuck Close, Robert Bechtle, and Richard Estes. Advertisement By the early ’80s, she had set her brushes aside to make bronze and clay sculptures, often taking her subject matter from ancient myth. Out of her studio came a procession of heroic Athenas, Daphnes, and Medusas, whom she sculpted while seeking to offer an alternative to the classical depictions of men she saw in public parks and plazas.
“Beautiful, powerful women have to be out there,” she argued, “instead of generals on horses.” Ms. Flack started out as an abstract expressionist, slinging paint onto canvases from her studio on Eighth Street in Manhattan, w.