BEVERLEY – Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Born in Wisconsin in 1887, she studied under Arthur Wesley Dow, whose teaching emphasised composition through line and structure rather than imitation of nature. That influence shaped everything she made. By the time she settled permanently in New Mexico in the 1940s, painting the desert landscape around Ghost Ranch, she had already established herself as a defining figure in American modernism. She died in 1986, aged 98.
Beverley Art Gallery is currently showing Georgia O’Keeffe: Memories of Drawings, an exhibition of 21 photogravures made in collaboration with her assistant Doris Bry. The works reproduce drawings spanning 1915 to 1963, covering nearly five decades of her practice. The exhibition runs until 23 May 2026.
Most people know O’Keeffe through her paintings. The oversized flowers, the bleached animal bones, the vast New Mexico skies. This exhibition shows something different. Working in charcoal and pencil, without colour, O’Keeffe produced drawings that are precise, structural and often abstract. They range from early experimental works that push close to pure abstraction, to later pieces that suggest natural forms — flowers, shells, hills — without ever quite committing to them.
The photogravure process reproduces these works with exceptional tonal accuracy, capturing the pressure and texture of the original marks. What you see in Beverley is as close as most people will ever get to the drawings themselves.
O’Keeffe’s place in art history is secure. She was the first major female artist to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1946. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which holds the largest collection of her work in the world, opened in 1997. Her paintings regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars.
The drawings are less well known. That is what makes this exhibition worth attending. They show the working foundation beneath the famous paintings — the thinking, the testing, the refinement. For anyone seriously interested in O’Keeffe, or in twentieth century American art, Memories of Drawings at Beverley Art Gallery is not an event to miss.
The exhibition is free to enter. Beverley Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.