Audrey Flack, Creator of Vibrant Photorealist Art, Dies at 93

Audrey Flack, a pioneer of photorealism who became known for oversize, in-your-face still lifes crowded with color and detail, died on Friday in Southampton, N.Y. She was 93.

Her daughter Hannah Marcus said her death, in a hospital, was caused by an aortic tear.

Ms. Flack’s best-known paintings were still lifes painted from photographs, sometimes with an airbrush. In “Queen,” a dewy rose, an orange section, a playing card and a photo locket with pictures of Ms. Flack and her mother nestle among other symbolic and sentimental objects on a canvas six and a half feet square. “Macarena of Miracles,” which was shown at the 1972 Whitney Biennial, is a precise close-up study of a wooden madonna sculpture in the cathedral of Seville attributed to the 17th-century sculptor Luisa Roldán, with special attention to her elaborately gilded robes and crystal tears. In “World War II (Vanitas),” Ms. Flack depicts a red candle, a string of pearls and a small silver tray of oversize petits fours sitting on a photograph of concentration camp inmates.

Before those still lifes, which mostly date to the 1970s, she made simpler, more deadpan photo-based work like “The Kennedy Motorcade,” in which an ordinary press image becomes ominous and otherworldly, or “Farb Family Portrait,” whose syrupy shadows add an eerie eccentricity to the image of an Upper West Side family at home.

Works like these were so straightforward and literal that they seemed to invite misunderstanding. The fact that Ms. Flack was often the only woman in a cohort of male painters didn’t help.

A painting like “Banana Split Sundae” could easily be taken for a critique of American excess, or a joke, while her appropriation of Baroque Catholic aesthetics in the Macarena paintings was read as satirical, even though she had traveled to Spain to photograph the sculpture after being introduced to the piece by a picture postcard from the curator Marcia Tucker.