LONDON — Georgia O’Keeffe has come to London, like a bracing American desert wind rippling the River Thames.
An exhibition of more than 100 works opening this week at Tate Modern is the art icon’s biggest-ever show outside the U.S.
Curators hope it will surprise visitors who know the artist for her giant flowers and sun-bleached animal skulls. The exhibition also offers O’Keeffe the pioneering abstract artist, the surrealist and who painted New York and New Mexico.
Cody Hartley, director of curatorial affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, says it is “the most important O’Keeffe exhibition in a generation.”
“The exhibition has gathered the most important works from O’Keeffe’s career and covers the whole breadth of her creativity,” he said on Monday.
O’Keeffe, who had her first major exhibition a century ago and died in 1986 aged 98, had an exceptionally long career.
The exhibition includes the large floral study “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold at auction in 2014 for $44 million. That’s a record for a female artist, though the label is not one O’Keeffe liked.
As a young teacher in Texas, O’Keeffe depicted the state’s “wide empty country”; in New York she painted angular skyscrapers and the busy East River.
The exhibition opens Wednesday and runs to Oct. 30. It moves to Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna from Dec. 7 to March 26, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from April to June 2017.
