NEW YORK, NY.- Audrey Flack, a pioneer of photorealism who became known for oversize, in-your-face still lifes crowded with color and detail, died Friday in Southampton, New York. She was 93.

Her daughter Hannah Marcus said her death, at a hospital, was caused by an aortic tear.

Flack’s best-known paintings were still lifes painted from photographs, sometimes with an airbrush. In “Queen,” a dewy rose, an orange section, a playing card and a photo locket with pictures of Flack and her mother nestle among other symbolic and sentimental objects on a canvas 6 1/2 feet square. “Macarena of Miracles,” which was shown at the 1972 Whitney Biennial in New York City, is a close-up study of a wooden Madonna sculpture in the cathedral of Seville, Spain, attributed to 17th-century sculptor Luisa Roldán, with special attention to her elaborately gilded robes and crystal tears. In “World War II (Vanitas),” Flack depicts a red candle, a string of pearls and a small silver tray of oversize petits fours sitting on a photograph of concentration camp inmates.

Before those still lifes, which mostly date to the 1970s, she made simpler, more deadpan photo-based work like “The Kennedy Motorcade,” in which an ordinary press image becomes ominous and otherworldly, or “Farb Family Portrait,” whose syrupy shadows add an eerie eccentricity to the image of an Upper West Side Manhattan family at home.

Works like these were so straightforward and literal that they seemed to invite misunderstanding. The fact that Flack was often the only woman in a cohort of male painters didn’t help.

A painting like “Banana Split Sundae” could easily be taken for a critique of American excess, or a joke, while her appropriation of baroque Catholic aesthetics in the Macarena paintings was read as satirical, even though she had traveled to Spain to photograph the sculpture after being introduced to the piece by a picture postcard from curator Marcia Tucker.

Flack always insisted that she was motivated by nothing more than a pure, almost abstract interest in light and color — the same interest that peers like Robert Bechtle or Chuck Close channeled into matte automobiles and expressionless faces — and by a desire to make her work accessible to as many viewers as possible.

She did paint “Chanel,” a study of lipsticks and perfume bottles, as, in her words, an “intentionally feminist painting” in 1974, and sexual politics became more explicit in her work later on. But if her subject matter initially seemed feminine, or feminist — and it did — it wasn’t because she had made a programmatic choice to make it so. It was simply because, however fierce her ambition, she was determined to follow her interests and honor her own life.

Audrey Lenora Flack was born on May 30, 1931, in Manhattan, the younger of two children of Morris Flack, who owned a garment factory, and Jeanette (Flichtenfeld) Flack. Her parents were immigrants from Poland.

In a memoir, “With Darkness Came Stars,” published this year, she described her mother as a high-stakes poker addict who often disappeared for days at a time. But she also crocheted, embroidered, cut old master reproductions out of magazines and hung Alberto Vargas pinups in the bathroom.

Flack graduated from the High School of Music & Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and won admission to Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan. From there she transferred to Yale, where she earned her bachelor of fine arts in 1952, after being recruited by artist and educator Josef Albers. She later studied anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League, a New York art school.

While at Cooper Union, Flack began visiting the Cedar Tavern, a well-known artists hangout in Greenwich Village, and met older painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. For a while she was a member of their crowd, producing powerful nonfigurative paintings — even as she fended off unwanted advances. (According to her memoir, Albers made advances, too.)

“I have asked myself why I didn’t sleep with Jackson Pollock, Bill de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mike Goldberg, Mort Feldman or Clement Greenberg,” she wrote. “Power, fame, entree into intellectual circles, exhibitions and reviews all came with these men, yet I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t attracted to testosterone-fueled aggression and out-of-control drinking.”

In any case, she loved figuration: Under Albers’ gaze at Yale, she splattered paint on canvas from 10 feet away, but alone in her room she copied old masters. In 1956, she was included in a large abstract expressionist group show at Stable Gallery in Manhattan, and her piece, “Lady With a Pink,” was hung between works by Lee Krasner and Milton Avery — but when people noticed its figurative elements, it was moved to a dark corner on the second floor.

Flack’s first marriage, to cellist Frank Levy, ended in divorce. Their older daughter, Melissa, was eventually diagnosed with severe autism and placed in a residential school, but not before Flack’s worries about her, as she struggled to care for her, were brushed off by her husband and several pediatricians.

When she married Bob Marcus, a former high school sweetheart, in 1970, he adopted her daughters.

In addition to her daughter Hannah, she is survived by her other daughter, Melissa Marcus; her stepdaughter, Leslie Marcus; her stepson, Mitchell Marcus; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Bob Marcus, a commodities trader, died in May. Another stepdaughter, Aileen Marcus, died in 2022.

In the early 1960s, Flack began painting from photographs, including snapshots of her daughters as well as press photos of John F. Kennedy and of people mourning his assassination. She went on to paint directly over projections, starting with the “Farb Family Portrait” commission from Oriole Farb, director of the Riverside Museum, which paid for Melissa Marcus’ first residential treatment. She also bought a square-format Hasselblad camera, turned her bathroom into a darkroom and learned to paint with an airbrush.

In the early 1980s, Flack switched to sculpture, working in bronze with more unambiguously feminist subjects, as in Egyptian Rocket Goddess.

After three decades she returned to painting, making intricate, cartoonlike scenes she described as “Post Pop Baroque” that she showed with the Hollis Taggart gallery. She had previously been represented by Louis K. Meisel, starting with his gallery’s first show in 1973.

Her “Leonardo’s Lady” (1974) was the first photorealist painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, and her work has been collected by numerous other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She and Mary Cassatt were the first two women to be included in the comprehensive textbook “Janson’s History of Art.”

She was also a dedicated musician. She fronted a band called the History of Art, for which she wrote art-related songs, and which performed at art museums, comedy clubs and Cooper Union.

Flack’s dogged commitment to painting in the face of setbacks and sexism was matched by her commitment to her family — but she always knew she had to keep the two separate.

“I kept my children and Melissa’s autism secret from the art world,” she wrote in her memoir. “I also never spoke of my husband’s total rejection of his own child and his increasingly abusive behavior. I never let them see the pain or the struggle I was dealing with.

“Having children was bad enough, but I thought that having a special-needs child would surely define me as nothing but a mother, a failure, a weak person, and that my work would be dismissed as ‘ladies’ art.’ I couldn’t let that happen. Art was my life long before I had children, and it would remain so forever.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.