Adding context, contrast
Christina Forrer’s MATRIX exhibit on display at Wadsworth Atheneum
Christina Forrer is standing in the doorway of the MATRIX modern art exhibition space at the Wadsworth Atheneum. She is half an hour away from speaking to a room full of people at the first in-person opening of an exhibit at the Wadsworth, with the artist present, since COVID.
She expresses nervousness, but she is in fact radiant, the artistic aura of one of her floor-to-ceiling cotton/wool tapestries brightening the room behind her.
Forrer is from Zurich, Switzerland but now lives and works in Los Angeles. She weaves large-scale tapestries that comment on modern moods like loneliness, despair, resignation and anger.
“Tapestry just seems easier for me to express what I want to express,” the artist says.
A crush of contemporary and classical
It was decided that Forrer would create new tapestries to display, as well as some works she did in other media, then juxtapose them with a variety of older artworks by others, chosen from the Wadsworth collections. The project ended up involving items spanning half a millennium, from “The Fall of Phaeton and the Metamorphosis of the Heliades” by an unknown artist from the early 15th century to a color image by Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt which depicts police officers swimming and was taken in 1983.
The contrast of Forrer’s tapestries —
which use a traditional, old-fashioned decorative art form to express bold modern emotions — with the established museum pieces leads to some wondrous visual contrasts that enhance the entire exhibition.
That crush of contemporary and classical already exists in Forrer’s work. The central large tapestry in the space, “Sepulcher,” is eight feet high and nearly 14 feet across, and contains a maelstrom of fantastical and all-too-real natural and social disturbances: the Boatman on the River Styx, burning buildings, a disembodied head, thunderstorms, Adam and Eve and more. “It’s all based on a mourning sampler,” Forrer explains, those traditional memorial embroideries popular in previous centuries. She describes her work with a refreshing immediacy and a total lack of pretense. Pointing to two characters engaged in a bizarre tug-of-war, she comments “I don’t know what they want, but they’re pulling at it.”
Her work generally contains themes of conflict. “Usually fighting and problems,” she says. “Daily issues we all deal with.”
She detects similar conflict in some of the Wadsworth items she’s placed in the exhibit. Framing the main threshold on the inside of the MATRIX gallery is the repeated image of a linoleum block print by children’s book illustrator Louise Kenyon showing a women with her children in the foreground while a man, presumably the father, sails a boat far behind them. Forrer interprets it as the man not wanting to be with his family, off having a good time by himself while the others deal with the concerns of the day.
“I work intuitively,” Forrer says. “Things come together. Like Icarus and Satan.” She came across a painting of the mythic Greek boy who flew into the sun by the artist Burgess “Jess” Collins, which had been exhibited in the second-ever MATRIX exhibit back in the mid-’70s. Jess’ Icarus evokes Victorian-era illustrators like Aubrey Beardsley. It’s offset by some of Forrer’s wilder modern images, some of them also drawn from Greek myths or demonology.
Serendipitous skirts
One of the most striking, and serendipitous, pairings in the exhibit involves a comical tapestry Forrer titled “High Tide (Big Bow),” in which a woman in a multicolored striped dress is shown to be standing balanced on top of the head of a man with a dismayed expression on his face. The man is completely underwater. The