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It got me many times through the years: I’d be walking through Philbrook and think I’d just seen a live woman, standing in some alcove in my peripheral vision, bending over a vacuum cleaner. Then I’d do a double-take and realize (again!) that it was the work of the surprising, delightful, masterful Tulsa artist Otto Duecker. The M.A. Doran Gallery, which has shown Duecker’s work since 1984, has confirmed to The Pickup that the beloved Tulsa artist died Friday, January 23, at age 77.
“It's just a big, huge loss for the Tulsa art community,” gallery owner Mary Ann Doran said. “For me, it's a huge personal loss. He was a close friend, and I was used to popping over and seeing all the progress on his work in his studio, which I always teased and said it's great because [the gallery] would get first pick.”
Best known for his hyperrealistic oil paintings of floating fruit, still lifes, and portraits of celebrities and historical figures from Marilyn Monroe to Winston Churchill to the Dalai Lama, Duecker exhibited work in galleries across the country, and locally his paintings hang in the permanent collections of the Philbrook Museum of Art and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. Born in Milwaukee in 1948, he settled in Oklahoma with his family and attended Oklahoma State University as a business major before, as a 2010 Tulsa People story reported, he had a conversation that changed everything: “As a college sophomore home on vacation, a friend said, ‘You love to paint. What I think you ought to do is get a teaching degree and you can paint in the summers.’ That’s what he did.”
Duecker stands with the likes of Patrick Gordon and the late Bill Rabon (another M.A. Doran Gallery-represented painter) as part of an extraordinary generation of Tulsa artists whose work brought the city to the attention of the global art world. “People loved his work because it's realism,” Doran said. “No one ever walked in and said, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ They really respected his talent, his ability to make magic with paint.”