Georgia O’Keeffe: Memories of Drawings

15 Jan-14 Feb 2026

PV 15 Jan 2026, 6-8pm

Overview

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is one of the most important artists in 20th-century American art, renowned for her distinctive balance of abstraction with figuration and tenaciously pursuing her innovative style. Her iconic works of organic forms – including flowers and bones – surreal abstractions, rural landscapes and urban cityscapes uniquely captured the experience of her environment and broke new ground for women artists.  
 
While best known as a painter, drawing was central to O’Keeffe’s practice. She used it as a language to evoke important moments and emotions – the curve of a flower petal, a desert horizon, the wave of one's hair, or the flow of a winding road. In fact, she took breaks from painting periodically throughout her career to focus only on drawing as it reinvigorated her, saying these were often the best times in her life.  
 
This exhibition presents a portfolio of 21 photogravures of drawings made by O’Keeffe between 1915 and 1963, spanning the period she established herself as a major figure in American Modernism. Photogravure is a printing method that produces etchings with the tone and detail of a photograph through exposure onto a copper plate. Using this process, O’Keeffe worked together with her agent and long-term friend Doris Bry (1920-2014) to create this collection of formative works. The selection charts key trajectories and motifs in O’Keeffe’s practice, including nine of her earliest charcoal abstracts that were presented in her inaugural exhibitions.  
 
In a text she published alongside the portfolio, O'Keeffe wrote a sometimes fragmentary, but often poetic commentary on why she made these drawings. Those memories are retold here within the exhibition texts.  
 
A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition from Southbank Centre, London. Curated by Charlotte Baker, Assistant Curator. 
  

Artists