Gathie Falk Exhibition on View at the McMichael

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The McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto is mounting Vancouver artist Gathie Falk's third career retrospective.

Gathie Falk: Revelations, which considers the artist's 60-year career, is on view until Jan. 2 in Kleinburg, Ont. At age 94, she is still making art.

"Falk is one of Canada’s most beloved and esteemed artists, long known and celebrated for her pioneering achievements in painting, performance art, ceramics, and installation art," the McMichael says.

"A trailblazer on all fronts, she has brought a rich sensibility to bear on her observations of the everyday, perceptions often tinged with the surreal and the uncanny." 

The exhibition opens with Falk's ceramic fruit piles, with subsequent sections devoted to her early work in performance, ceramic still life, and selections from her Theatre in Black and White and Colour, which extends notions of theatrical presentation into the realm of oil on canvas. 

The show continues with her flower border paintings and lush painterly works from her Pieces of Water series. Another section gathers Falk's sculptural investigations into shoes and clothing, often in serial form.

The exhibition concludes with the Night Sky paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, accompanied by Reclining Figure (after Henry Moore): Stella, a major sculptural work from 1999.

Falk, of Mennonite heritage, was born in Manitoba in 1928 and settled in Vancouver in the 1960s.

Her earlier retrospectives were organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985 and 2001. The latter exhibition travelled to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont., and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.

The McMichael exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by chief curator, Sarah Milroy; Vancouver curator Daina Augaitis; Vancouver artists Hank Bull, Liz Magor and Landon Mackenzie; critic Nancy Tousley; and art historians John Geoghegan and Jocelyn Anderson.

Source: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Equinox Gallery