Gathie Falk: Variations

Gathie Falk is a legendary Canadian artist who has explored the disciplines of painting, ceramic, performance art, and installation over the span of a half-century. Her work explores the ordinary world around her, with a rich sensibility and often tinged with the surreal and uncanny. This publication includes an introduction by McMichael Chief Curator Sarah Milroy, a lead essay by Vancouver curator and writer Daina Augaitis, and a host of other artists and writers. It summarizes an extraordinary career, with full-page images of her artworks and rarely seen archival photos of the artist's studio, performance works, and Falk herself.

Format: Hardback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 25 October 2022
Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing

Gathie Falk: Revelations, published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition curated by Sarah Milroy, delves into the illustrious career of a legendary Canadian artist. Now in her nineties, Gathie Falk was born in 1928 in Brandon, Manitoba, and eventually settled in Vancouver, where she established herself as one of Canada's most visionary and experimental artists. Over the span of half a century, Falk has explored the disciplines of painting, ceramic, performance art, and installation, manifesting her boundless imagination through a myriad of captivating creations. These include flying horses, rows of potted conifers adorned with blossoms and ribbons, floating cabbages, piles of glossy apples, gentlemen's brogues presented in reliquary style, expanses of water, and burgeoning flower beds bursting with color. In all her works, effulgence and order exist in a dynamic tension as she delves into her generative themes and variations.

A trailblazer on all fronts, Falk has brought a rich sensibility to her observations of the everyday, often tinged with the surreal and the uncanny. From her fruit piles to the landmark performances of her early career, to her extended pursuit of themes with variations in her painting practice—expanses of water dazzling with light, riotous flower borders set against cement sidewalks, night skies pierced by starlight or obscured by clouds—she finds wonder in the routine world around her, pursuing her work with modesty and diligence that reflects her Russian Mennonite heritage.

The publication includes an introduction by McMichael Chief Curator Sarah Milroy, a lead essay by Vancouver curator and writer Daina Augaitis (who examines her performance and installation works in a national and international context), and a host of other artists and writers, rising to the occasion.

Weight: 1094g
Dimension: 235 x 261 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781773271897