Georgia O'Keeffe's 1926 close-up painting featuring a black iris is titled Black Iris. The work enlarges the flower so dramatically that its petals become an abstract arrangement of dark curves and subtle color transitions.
O'Keeffe repeatedly painted flowers at unusually close range. She explained that people often overlooked flowers because they were small, so she made them large enough to be noticed. This approach became one of the defining features of her public reputation, although her output also included architecture, bones, landscapes, and nonrepresentational compositions.
Black Iris is often discussed in connection with debates about symbolic interpretations of O'Keeffe's flowers. O'Keeffe rejected many attempts to assign fixed meanings to them and emphasized looking carefully at the forms themselves. The painting's title identifies the flower and its dominant color without requiring a symbolic reading.