Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk
Gathie Falk, December 2010
Born	Agathe Falk 1928 (age 88–89) Manitoba, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Occupation	artist
Known for	painting, sculpture, pottery
Awards	Order of Canada Order of British Columbia

Gathie Falk CM OBC is a Canadian painter, sculptor, installation and performance artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Gathie Falk was born on January 31, 1928 in Alexander, Manitoba, Canada, to immigrant Russian parents. Her father Cornelius died that same year and her mother Agatha went to work to support her and her older brother Gordon, while her eldest brother Jack had to move in with another family. In 1930, the Falk family relocated to another small town in southern Manitoba and continued to move around, eventually ending up in Winnipeg when Falk was a teenager. At 16, she left high school to work so she could assist with the family finances and completed her education via correspondence courses. When she was 19, Falk and her mother moved to Vancouver where she still resides. She became a school teacher and taught elementary students until 1965, when she left to commit herself full-time to creating art. At one time, Falk was a pupil of Lawren Harris, one of the artists from the Group of Seven.

Falk has worked in various media, including installation, ceramics, painting, drawing and papier-mâché. Her works find their source in the events and objects of everyday life, inviting us to consider the significance of the commonplace, including her well-known ceramic sculpture Fruit Piles (1967–70), Single Right Men's Shoes (1972–73) and Picnics (1976–77). As described by Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville, "Falk is remarkable for her ability to seize the ordinary and turn it into a powerful revelatory force... the paintings and sculptures she produces have a deeply personal presence that is grounded in an intense scrutiny of her daily environment." Drawing from subjects ranging from apples, oranges and shoes to dogs, dresses, hedges and clouds, and often amplifying their beauty through repetition, her work summons and recalls for viewers the ways in which the everyday claims a vivid place in our imagination.

Falk has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States, France and Japan. A major retrospective show of her 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, British Columbia).