Georgia O'Keeffe is especially famous for painting flowers in close-up.
Her enlarged flower paintings became some of the best-known images in American modernism. By presenting petals and centers at a monumental scale, O'Keeffe encouraged viewers to study shapes, curves, color relationships, and organic structures rather than seeing a flower merely as a small decorative object.
She painted many kinds of flowers, including poppies, irises, lilies, and jimson weeds. Her flower pictures are often described as abstract or nearly abstract, but O'Keeffe repeatedly resisted fixed interpretations that reduced them to symbols of sexuality. She emphasized looking closely at forms that people usually overlooked.
Flowers were only one part of her career. She also painted New York skyscrapers, New Mexico landscapes, animal bones, shells, and doors. The close-up flower paintings remain particularly associated with her name because their scale and simplified forms made them immediately recognizable and influential.