To coincide with Ikon’s exhibition of works by the 15^th century master Carlo Crivelli, the gallery shows two works by the pioneering photorealist artist Audrey Flack.

Pollock’s Cans (2016), is based on Crivelli’s Pietà (1476), whilst a very recent painting combines a portrait of Flack’s husband with the Brera’s Madonna Della Candeletta (1490).

Born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York, Flack studied art at Cooper Union and Yale University in the early 1950s, the latter under the tutelage of colourist Joseph Albers. Living and working in New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism, she adopted their approach to all-over compositions painted with intense energy. With an interest in the work of Old Masters – including Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Reubens – she turned away from abstraction towards figuration, initially through a group of family and self-portraits and later in a series of still lives, revealing her commitment to the representation of objects. By the 1970s, she was painting images from news media in a hyper-realistic style, establishing her as a pioneer of Photorealism.