No. 8 - Special

For years, Georgia O’Keeffe translated the intangible, strange feelings into shapes and structures she had long stored in the recesses of her minds. She called these her ‘unknowns’, and they are a sort of marriage between matter and emotion, an arranged pairing of found visuals and unclear feelings, together creating an explanation and a purpose for both. O’Keeffe created a form of Organic Abstraction that could be considered the first truly American modern art movement, and so much of her painterly work is rooted in the natural world as not just environment, but extension of the human mind. The spiral, as seen here, reappeared again and again in her work over the course of her career, both in landscapes, flowers, and rippling waters as well as smoke emitted from trains and the heaving, falling weight of skyscrapers. But here, it is removed from the context of anything other than emotion - an unfurling form that speaks to regeneration as much as it does to the descent into something darker.