Canadian art community mourns Gathie Falk
The pioneering multimedia artist who made her name with glossy ceramic fruits and shoes is being remembered for her “joyful affirmation of all that is beautiful in this world”
At left, Gathie Falk’s 14 Grapefruits, from 1970, in ceramic. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography, ©Gathie Falk. At right, Gathie Falk in 2010, photo by Edward Kehler
TRIBUTES ARE POURING in from Canada’s art community at news prominent Vancouver artist Gathie Falk passed away December 22 at 97 years old.
UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery remembered Falk today in a post as “one of the country’s most brilliant multimedia artists who continuously straddled contradictions in her life and practice—the ordinary and the extraordinary, art and craft, the universal and the singular”.
The Vancouver Art Gallery memorialized her this week as “One of the most inventive, idiosyncratic and astonishingly prolific artists of her generation.”
Falk had called her singular work a “veneration of the ordinary”, using papier-mâché, painting, installation, and performance art in her iconic pieces. That could mean pyramid-shaped piles of shiny ceramic apples and grapefruits; a performance-art video centring on an old-school wringer washing machine; and shoes lovingly crafted from clay.
Falk had humble beginnings but her life turned out to be anything but ordinary, as readers of her 2018 memoir, Apples, etc., published by Figure 1 and coauthored by Robin Laurence, discovered. Much of her appreciation of simple things was rooted in her upbringing by Mennonite parents who had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution and settled in rural Manitoba. After her father died when she was still a baby, her mother worked the fields by day, struggling to support her and her siblings. As a teen Falk worked picking fruit and waiting tables, then fabricated luggage in a factory after moving West to Vancouver.
Though art caught her imagination early on, Falk’s career in it didn’t formally begin until 1965, when she left teaching to study art—only to abandon formal studies at UBC to work as an artist full time, seeing her first Home Environment show in 1968 at Vancouver’s Douglas Gallery. The groundbreaking room-sized installation combined found objects with her now famous ceramic renderings of domestic items; one thrift-store armchair, flocked and painted pink, featured a ceramic men’s jacket and tie thrown on the back, with a large ceramic fish on each arm.
“At a time when many women artists faced limited institutional recognition, the Gallery actively acquired Falk's work from the early days of her career and today holds the most significant collection of her work in public hands—including the foundational ‘Home Environment’ (1968), one of the earliest examples of installation art in Canada,” posted the VAG, which has hosted numerous solo exhibitions of Falk’s work over the decades.
Her works sit in the collections of other major public galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada.
Gathie Falk’s Cabbages installation at the Audain Art Museum. Photo by Oisin McHugh Photography
Installation view of Gathie Falk’s final show, at the Equinox Gallery, The Moment: Gathie Falk Paintings from the Sixties, September 6th to October 11th, 2025
In 1997, Falk was named to the Order of Canada, in 2003 she won the Governor General's Award in Visual Arts, and in 2013 she received the Audain Prize.
More recently, Revelations, a stunning retrospective curated by Sarah Milroy and organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, hit Whistler’s Audain Art Museum in 2023-24; Stir wrote of the show then, “Punctuated with bright hues of orange and red, it’s an exhibition that’s full of joy and humour—though darker themes of mortality hover just beneath the upbeat surfaces.” Her final exhibition was at Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery; called The Moment: Gathie Falk Paintings from the Sixties, it showed the development of her experimentation with brushwork, vivid colour, and subject matter.
Some of Falk’s best-known work included 2010-11’s unsettling The Problem with Wedding Veils, featuring the titular object hovering ghostlike, made of papier-mâché, with rocks weighing down its train. Her vibrant, shiny, ceramic stacked fruits were instantly recognizable. One work featured dozens of lowly cabbages, crafted from clay and glazed to a beautiful green, hanging from the ceiling like celestial orbs. Another, 1973’s 18 Pairs of Red Shoes With Roses, found the ceramic footwear carefully lined up with their laces at different stages of done and undone; each has different, personalized creases where their wearer bent their foot walking. Like so many of her other shoe sculptures, they speak of the body and presence, and a life of work—but there is also hint of haunting absence.
Falk is being remembered for her boundless creativity and her willingness to take artistic risks, but also as a beloved member of the Canadian arts community.
As London, Ontario’s Michael Gibson Gallery posted today: “She was one of a kind, a fearless artist, hard worker, gracious host and lover of butter. We will treasure our friendship with her.”
The McMichael Gallery, which announced her passing, said it would "never forget her rampant creativity and her joyful affirmation of all that is beautiful in this world".
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