Christina Forrer

Parker Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition with Christina Forrer, her first solo with the gallery following a two-person presentation in 2022. The show brings together new weavings and works on paper, installed atop an artist-designed wallpaper.

Forrer mines fables and fairytales to present scenes of well worn folkloric dramas peppered with private anxieties. Cartoonish people and animals traverse architecture and landscape at moments of often violent metamorphosis. These newest weavings have a particular focus on spatial elements, with houses and buildings functioning as extensions of personal identity. In Training Tables, a large face peeks into a domestic interior, sliced open like a dollhouse to reveal a vibrant home full of activity. Floor tiles and window panes become pattern in the tapestry format, escaping the confines of three dimensional space to reverberate in a colorful psychological frenzy. Forrer combines the handmade technique of weaving with the magical world of giant interlopers and multi-colored domesticity. This home exists in another realm where buildings live entwined with creatures large and small.

The Bavarian fairy tale The Turnip Princess continues to serve as a source of inspiration for Forrer, particularly the young and beautiful princess of the tale cursed to appear to her prince as an elderly woman–forced into old age before she is ready. Foiled Love depicts the old woman stooped and feeble next to the enchanted cave which contains the power to transform her. The cave is rendered in thread of varied weights, vibrating with dizzying colored patterns. The woman's aged exterior belies the intense magic consuming her, a distinction carefully delineated by the cave's sharp, layered border.

A vinyl wallpaper composed of Forrer's drawings and watercolors overlayed and collaged together serves as a backdrop for the tapestries and framed works on paper. Forrer uses her drawings both as origin point and conversation alongside her textile works. The intense expressiveness and improvisation present in Forrer's practice finds tension in the repetitive planning required in weaving, which the wallpaper and drawings underscore. The tapestries can also be traced back to folklore, such as in the tale of Sleeping Beauty, when a benevolent fairy ducks behind a tapestry to hide her presence from the evil witch. Forrer's enormous weavings hang like their own magic portals to hide out in, humming with logic ancient and unknowable.

Christina Forrer (b. 1978, Zürich) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions include Luhring Augustine, New York, NY (2022 and 2019); Christina Forrer: Matrix 187, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2021-2022); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL (2021 and 2018); Feet of the Devil, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2019-2020); Swiss in Situ | Christina Forrer: Grappling Hold, Swiss Institute, New York, NY (2017); Cat Lady, The Finley, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Grice Bench, Los Angeles, CA (2016 and 2014). Selected group exhibitions include You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2025); Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2024); Narrative Threads: Textile Art Now, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2023); Christina Forrer and Rebecca Morris, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Mario Merz Prize: Finalists Exhibition, Fondazione Merz, Torino, Italy (2022); Bianca Beck, Tamara Gonzales, Christina Forrer, Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH (2021); This Is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany (2021); Made in L.A. 2020: A Version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA (2020-2021); Happy!, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FL (2019-2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Niko Pirosmani: Promeneur entre les mondes, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, Arles, France (2019); and Unorthodox, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2015). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2014). A catalogue of her work will be published by Luhring Augustine in 2025.