Lady’s Review of the Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition at Tate Modern

In most cities, summer is a time get outdoors. Then there’s London. While elsewhere people make plans for picnics in parks, we prepare for indoor activities. Which is one reason why it’s worth heading to the new Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at Tate Modern when it opens tomorrow. It’s going to be this summer’s hottest ticket, and I just got a sneak peek…

Georgia O’Keeffe

If you’re not familiar with Georgia O’Keeffe, she was one of the most famous American artists of the 20th century. Best known for her paintings of flowers, she spent much of her career living and working in New Mexico.

O’Keeffe developed a modern American style with roots in abstraction and landscape, and is still known for being a pioneer of a distinctly American modernism.

Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition at Tate Modern

This summer, Tate Modern is displaying the first exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work in the UK in 20 years, and the largest ever outside the US.

It’s also significant because it’s the initial exhibition to launch after the big opening of Tate Modern’s new extension last month, and because this year is the centenary of Georgia O’Keeffe’s debut in New York in 1916.

As if those aren’t reasons enough to go, the exhibition itself displays 221 objects, 115 of which are major works spanning the central part of Georgia O’Keeffe’s artistic career.

No public collection in the UK owns any of her work, so this is the only place to see it.

I was impressed by the breadth of the works included when I visited for the press preview yesterday (but you knew that from Snapchat).

From early mature works in charcoal, I explored 13 rooms packed with paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and photographs.

The exhibition touches on O’Keeffe’s interests in synesthesia, with paintings that translate music into her signature vibrant colors, through to her obsession with travel, with paintings of the sky above the clouds.

In between are her classic flowers—although not as many as I expected—and skulls—which she used as an allegory for the Great Depression and also to show the concept of the ‘far away’.

Several series of paintings also show different interpretations of trees—some more abstract than others—and doors—gradually reducing the object down to its simplest form.

In all, the exhibition gives a broad overview of the bulk of the artist’s career and a much more varied display of her work than what many people know her for.

Despite having visited Santa Fe and its Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, I learned a lot about her and her work though the exhibition.

So if it’s raining in London between now and October 30th (and it will be), head over to the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at Tate Modern and soak up some of the vibrant colors that are too often missing from London’s sky.

Given the rarity of this display, it may be your only chance.

Have you seen Georgia O’Keeffe’s work? What do you think?

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