Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory; Georgia O'Keeffe, 1938
Georgia O’Keeffe valued the remarkable landscapes of New Mexico, and made locations like Cerro Pedernal iconic. -Robert A. Kret, Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Santa Fe, New Mexico (PRWEB) November 06, 2014
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is pleased to present “Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch Views,” an exhibition which brings together brilliant paintings of the stark landscape and spectacular color at Ghost Ranch, one of her New Mexico homes and the site of O’Keeffe’s most famous landscape paintings. The exhibition is the second in a series, following “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abiquiu Views,” which included works inspired by her other New Mexico residence, in Abiquiu.
“This exhibition demonstrates the significance of her homes as a source of artistic inspiration,” says Robert A. Kret, Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “O’Keeffe valued the remarkable landscapes of New Mexico, and made locations like Cerro Pedernal iconic.”
The exhibition, which continues until March 22, 2015, includes paintings of the landscape, as well as images of bones and flowers often juxtaposed against the land and sky, among her most distinct and original contributions to American modernism. It includes works such as Red Hills and White Flower (1937), Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs) (1940), and Pedernal (1945). The featured paintings date from the 1930s and 40s. During this period, she experimented with simplified abstractions and complex compositions in which bones and flowers float above the horizon of the Cerro Pedernal (Flint Hill), the distinctive mountain she could see from her Ghost Ranch home. It was twelve miles away, but it became an intimate view as she painted it repeatedly, referring to it lovingly as “my mountain.”
O’Keeffe first visited the ranch in 1934 and made it her summer home in 1940. The house offered her immediate access to the nearby red hills, great cliffs, and dry arroyos. “At the back door are the red hills and the cliffs and the sands—the badlands. I go out my back door and walk for 15 minutes and I am some place that I’ve never been before, where it seems that no one has ever been before me,” she wrote.
O’Keeffe collected countless bones on her long walks through the rocky terrain. In addition to making them the subject of her paintings, the artist employed bones to explore the spatial relationships of near and far. After a decade of depicting bones as the focus of her work, O’Keeffe began to employ bones as a lens to frame a view, a conceptual move that prompted two of the paintings in the exhibition: Pelvis IV (1944) and Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow (1945).
Long after O’Keeffe had painted her last landscape, the Ghost Ranch house and the vast landscape served as a sanctuary where she continued to enjoy walks until late in her life.
The Museum is currently also exhibiting “Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line / Trazando una Línea Cosmopolita,” open until January 18, 2015.
###
ABOUT GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM:
To inspire all current and future generations, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum preserves, presents and advances the artistic legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe and modernism through innovative public engagement, education, and research. Opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1997, the Museum counts O’Keeffe’s two New Mexico homes as part of its extended collection. The Museum’s collections, exhibitions, research center, publications and educational programs contribute to scholarly discourse and serve a diverse audience. For more information, please visit http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/
Conditions of Use
IMAGE GUIDELINES
Permission is for one-time use only and not for multimedia usage or any other media, known or unknown, or promotions without the written authorization of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. The images may only be reproduced with the strict understanding that they will not be cropped or altered in any way, bled to the edges, guttered, wrapped around the outside cover, nor superimposed with any printing. Proper credit must be given for the image. Full image credit and copyright information will be supplied along with high resolution images for reproduction.
Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory, 1938
Georgia O’Keeffe
Oil on canvas
20 x 30 (50.8 x 76.2)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Gift of The Burnett Foundation (2007.01.024)
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
CR940
For further information, or to request high resolution or other available image files, please contact:
Alexandra Pratt, JLH Media
alexandra(at)jlhmedia(dot)com
505 310 2489
