Which American painter is known for her large-scale flower paintings?

Georgia O'Keeffe is the American painter known for her large-scale flower paintings. She enlarged blossoms until petals, folds, and color relationships filled the canvas, making familiar natural forms appear abstract, monumental, and intensely close.

O’Keeffe began producing these magnified flower images in the 1920s, when photography and modernist cropping were influencing American art. Her first large-scale flower painting is generally identified as Petunia, No. 2, painted in 1924 and exhibited the following year. Other celebrated examples include Oriental Poppies and her Red Canna paintings.

She made roughly 200 flower paintings during a career spanning seven decades, but flowers were only one part of her artistic world. She also painted New York skyscrapers, New Mexico landscapes, animal bones, and desert forms. Critics often interpreted her flowers as sexual symbols, but O’Keeffe repeatedly rejected that imposed reading and insisted that viewers look closely at the flowers themselves.