DUBLIN, IRELAND.- An exhibition of the work Georgia O’Keeffe, of one of the legendary figures of 20th-century American art, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 7 March. Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction comprises some 25 works dating from 1918 to 1977, less than a decade before her death at the age of 98 in 1986. The exhibition presents a survey of her entire career, exploring the central focus of her work – the transformation of nature into abstraction by expressing an object’s essence through colour, form and allusion. It includes landscape paintings, flower studies and abstract works, her major areas of interest throughout her remarkable career.

Over the course of seven decades Georgia O’Keeffe became a major presence in American art; renowned not only for the stylized beauty of her work but also for steadfastly remaining true to her own unique vision amid the many shifting artistic trends of the time. Almost unfailingly, she took her inspiration from what she saw around her, more especially in the Texas Panhandle and in the stunning landscapes of New Mexico, which she visited every year and where she eventually settled.

A pivotal early influence were the then revolutionary ideas of the artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist’s personal ideas and feelings and that this was best achieved by the harmonious arrangement of line, colour and ‘notan’ (the Japanese system of lights and darks). She herself stated that “nothing is less real that realism … it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things … I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not a copy.” O’Keeffe’s paintings range from early representational works to purely abstract shapes with colours that are more conceptual than naturalistic, adding to a heightened sensation of clarity. Although imbued with a certain eroticism and mysticism, they still maintain a careful restraint.

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Wisconsin, USA. She was of Irish descent, her parental grandparents, Pierce and Catherine O’Keeffe, left Co Cork on 1848 for America. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League, New York. The international photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband, promoted O’Keeffe’s work from 1923 until his death in 1946, organising annual exhibitions of her work throughout the United States. As early as the mid-1920s, when O’Keeffe first began painting her large-scale depictions of flowers, which are among her best-known works, she had become recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists. Three year after Stieglitz’s death O’Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose landscape inspired her work from 1929. O’Keeffe continued to work in oil until the mid 1970s, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting. She continued to work in pencil and watercolour and also produced objects in clay. She died in 1986 at the age of 98. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, was opened in 1997 and is the first museum in the United States dedicated to a woman artist.

The exhibition is presented in association with THE IRISH TIMES. The exhibition is curated by Richard Marshall, independent curator, consultant, art historian and curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 1975 to 1993. The exhibition is a partnership between IMMA and the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Italy, where it will be shown from July to October 2007.