Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Audrey Flack
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
83%
Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas). 1977-78. Oil over acrylic on canvas
Each object is finite and distinct and hyperpresent — it's a very "linear" piece — and bounded by its edges to an almost overdetermined degree. The way everything cohabitates within the painting's ostensibly unified pictorial space is oblique, almost ambivalent: as if each depicted object actually exists on its own completely separate plane, within its own hermetic representational environment. (Look at the way the lipstick rests on both the skull and the glass. This painting has many paintings inside it.) Working against this effect, the extreme density of all these discretized objects forces the overall image — as if against the will of all the lonely things it shows — to pull itself together, which it does towards its upper center, where the arrow atop the hourglass points into the underside of the fruitstalk. This disconnect between the type of space and the type of substance Flack's painting depicts justifies the deadness of its modeling, the awkward blur to all of its boundaries. The artwork's ugliness is that of reality's refusal to ever totally come together. (2025)