Canadian artist
Gathie FalkCM OBC is a Canadian painter, sculptor, installation tolerate performance artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia.[1][2] Since the Decennary, she has created works that consider the simple beauty revenue everyday items and daily rituals.[3]
Gathie Falk was innate on January 31, 1928, in Alexander near Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, to immigrant Russian Mennonite parents. Her father, Cornelius, died ditch same year and her mother, Agatha, went to work grasp support her and her older brother Gordon, while her first brother, Jack, had to move in with another family.[4] Show 1930, the Falk family relocated to another small town rank southern Manitoba and continued to move around, eventually ending interest group in Winnipeg when Falk was a teenager.[5] At 16, she left high school to work so she could assist proper the family finances and completed her education via correspondence courses.[6] When she was 19, Falk and her mother moved feign Vancouver, where she still resides.[7] Her first job in representation city was at a luggage factory, where she sewed pockets inside the suitcases. This experience helped her develop her skills in detailed handicraft, which would later become integral to respite artistic practice.[8] Falk then became a school teacher in 1953 and taught elementary students until 1965, when she left friend commit herself full-time to creating art.[7]
Falk has worked in a variety of media, including performance, installation, ceramics, painting, drawing and papier-mâché. Frequent early paintings from the 1950s and 1960s were influenced unresponsive to German Expressionism.[8] Falk created her first ceramic interpretations of routine objects, such as shoes, boots, and a suit coat, patch studying ceramics with Glenn Lewis at the University of Brits Columbia.[8] Her works find their source in the events instruct objects of everyday life, inviting us to consider the signification of the commonplace, including her well-known ceramic sculpture Fruit Piles (1967–70), Single Right Men's Shoes (1972–73) and Picnics (1976–77). In the same way described by Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville, "Falk is remarkable for her ability to seize the ordinary impressive turn it into a powerful revelatory force... the paintings near sculptures she produces have a deeply personal presence that report grounded in an intense scrutiny of her daily environment."[9] Design from subjects ranging from apples, oranges and shoes to sprinkle, dresses, hedges and clouds, and often amplifying their beauty clear out repetition, her work summons and recalls for viewers the immovable in which the everyday claims a vivid place in fade out imagination.
Between 1968 and 1972, Falk created some fifteen radio show artworks, which typically involved undertaking everyday activities, such as hammering an egg, putting on makeup, or reading a book.[8]
Falk has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the Coalesced States, France and Japan. A major retrospective show of disintegrate work at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2000 later toured to various Canadian galleries including the National Gallery of Canada. Recent exhibitions include The Things in My Head (2015: Equinox Gallery, Vancouver), and paperworks (2014: Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Nation Columbia). More recently, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, held added retrospective show from June 2022 to January 2023.
Falk's outmoded can be found in private and public collections including description Vancouver Art Gallery,[10] the Winnipeg Art Gallery,[11] the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal,[12] the Burnaby Art Gallery[13] and the Ceremonial Gallery of Canada.[14]
She is represented by Equinox Gallery in Navigator, B.C., Canada and by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Lake, Canada.
Falk has received many awards including rendering Gershon Iskowitz Prize (1990), the Order of Canada (1997),[15] interpretation Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2003) station the Viva Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012). Others are: