ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 26, 1996 TAG: 9603280077
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
Audrey Flack's work has long been big in the modern art world. But it's about to get bigger.
Flack's 40-foot statue of Catherine of Portugal soon will crown the bank of the East River in the borough of Queens in New York.
Anyone who would like an early peek can get one at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, where a number of Flack's paintings and sculptures are on exhibit.
Her statues - with their flowing lines and classical themes - already have made an impression on museum-goers, said the museum's director, Joanne Kuebler.
Among the works: an enormous talking head representing Daphne, caught at the moment of turning into a tree (to escape the overly amorous Apollo), which includes real tree limbs; a bust of Civitas, one of four goddesses Flack sculpted for an exhibit in Rock Hill, S.C.; a bronze statue of Athena; and a lively statue of Queen Catherine, model for the towering figure to be erected in New York.
It is the first time Flack's model for the massive statue has been exhibited in a museum, Kuebler said.
It is Catherine for whom the New York borough of Queens supposedly is named.
Flack established her reputation in the '60s as a photo realist painter - a number of those works are included in the exhibit as well - and only later turned to sculpture, Kuebler said.
Though her work often refers to ancient subjects it is also her own, including such jarring contemporary touches as prominently placed bullets and dice - as though emphasizing life is risky business.
Flack's work is represented in many major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Kuebler said. She is participating in a lecture series at Radford University - which cooperated with the art museum on the exhibit.
The exhibit title: "Love Conquers All."
Flack herself was scheduled to give a lecture last week opening the Radford University Galleries' exhibit of works by pop artist Andy Warhol. "Andy Warhol: Early Portraits," from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, is a big deal for the school galleries - which under normal circumstances could not afford a show by such a well-known artist, said Anna Fariello, galleries director.
The works are on loan from the Richmond museum, which surrendered them free of charge. Private funding paid for transportation and other incidental costs - which still were equal to the galleries' annual budget, Fariello said.
The shipping crates alone (luckily provided by the Richmond museum) cost $20,000, Fariello said. The gallery had to install a special security system just for the exhibit.
Staffers from the Richmond museum came to hang the works. "I was not allowed to touch them," Fariello said.
There are few classical references in Warhol's work.
Instead, Warhol focused on such mass-produced consumer goods as soup cans, soda bottles and steel wool pads - highlighting the emptiness of much of late 20th-century life. "These banal commercial products, produced by machine ... flatly identified the dehumanization which was becoming an acceptable part of our lives," Fariello writes in her notes for the exhibit.
"Rather than challenge this notion, Warhol embraced it as evidenced by his statement in a 1963 interview, 'I want to be a machine.'"
Warhol's portraits, some of which are represented in the Radford show, included such pop icons as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
"Love Conquers All," an exhibition of works by artist Audrey Flack, is featured at the Art Museum of Western Virginia through May 19.
"Early Portraits by the late Andy Warhol may be seen at Radford University's Flossie Martin Gallery through April 14.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: "Head of Civitas," a 1993 bronze bust by Audrey Flack.by CNBcolor.