by Lis Bensley
To fully absorb the eclectic span of Gertrud Parker’s work, it’s best to start with her materials list. Embedded amid the usual artistic suspects are jellyfish gut and pheasant wings, knitting and quail eggs, sand and snakeskin, driftwood, beads, feathers, and cement. Parker, who died in 2021 at 96, was no stranger to experiment. Everything was fair game. This was an artist who defied categorization. Willem de Kooning, who hated the idea of “isms,” would have approved.
Gertrud Parker: The Possible, at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, presents a mini-retrospective of Parker’s unorthodox inventiveness, her credo that anything was allowable in the artistic process long before it was fashionable to meld fine art, crafts and found objects. Given the sweep of Parker’s palette, it’s fitting that she also founded the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco to lift craft into the realm of fine art. As this show demonstrates, Parker thrived on breaking the rules and, in the process, expanded her creative freedom.
Parker was born in Vienna, where she lived until just before the Nazi invasion. The family fled first to Paris, then New York, eventually landing in Marin. There, she settled into a two-story space heralded by a simple sign out front reading GERTRUD. Natasha Boas, the show’s co-curator, was hypnotized by the magic of the interior, writing in the exhibition catalog: “Alongside newspaper and magazine clippings showcasing weaving and fiber arts from various cultures, this portal into her passions holds Petrossian caviar tins full of beads and natural pigments, peacock feathers in tequila bottles, Caran d’Ache colored-pencil trays, human hair and horsehair collections, birds’ nests and feathers, driftwood, snakeskins, Japanese fans, balls of yarn, voodoo dolls, wooden crosses, jars of sea glass, ceramic vessels, framed drawings made by family and friends, a Giants pennant, a UC Berkeley stuffed-bear mascot, a photograph of trussed whole pigs in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant vitrine, broken reading glasses, a collage supporting ‘Barbie for President,’ mangled mannequins, tarot cards, and much, much more.”
Several of these trinkets and found objects have been woven into works on view in the recent exhibit. Shelf (2001), a stunning assemblage of hair, each large tuft wrapped in a bandage of gut and aligned along steel shelves, is arguably one of the strongest pieces in the show. Each package suggests figures in body bags awaiting identification at the very least, a respectful burial if lucky. Parker’s nod to the Holocaust also references the women whose hair was shorn by the French as punishment for their collaboration with the Nazis during the war. Shelf brings to mind the work of Eva Hesse, whom Parker greatly admired. Who might have influenced whom, one can’t help but wonder.
Further homage to the Holocaust is evident in Ancestors, a small, chilling (undated) piece crafted from aluminum, gut and raffia. The abstracted figures, tied to one another from their waists, appear to be dancing in captivity, a celebration of the indelible spirit of her people that could not be silenced by death.
Parker and Hesse shared a palette of ephemeral material, creating works that deteriorated over time. Like much of Hesse’s sculptures, many of Parker’s creations were not salvageable. This was especially true of her signature sculptures crafted with animal gut. Boas makes clear that given Parker’s daily studio practice, she was driven more by process than product, an insatiable curiosity about unlikely pairings and daring new motifs.
A table of artifacts holds visual wonders. A small, delicate vase fashioned from gut resembled a relic from an ancient Greek archeological dig. The piece is at once brittle but defiant as it confronts the ravages of time. Other small mixed-media sculptures hover close by, adventures in material whimsically playing with form. Driftwood Series #4 (2005) juxtaposes organic and inorganic materials, small synthetic shapes that
sprout from the earth, temporal at best. Hovering close by lies an abstracted bronze bull to remind viewers that not everything fades. Old dresses embellished with fiber, gut and resin are testaments to Parker’s youthful skills with embroidery and knitting and later an attraction to textiles after Parker began working with fiber artists in the Bay Area.
Several of Parker’s watercolors are on display, the most recent being a series of self-portraits she painted during her 90s, the presence of an image of the iPhone in many, a giveaway to their genesis. As was her signature style, each piece incorporated clever embellishments—a torn family photograph, thread, color pushed outside the picture plane, gut, collage and encaustic. In these works in particular, Parker played with encaustics like a child with her first set of paints, scraping the material, dripping it on the surface, then carving it away. The images feel as though they could almost come to life. Looking in the Mirror (2018) could be an image of the artist taking a selfie as flattened objects—tiles, a table, potted plants—seem to float around her.
Parker was particularly drawn to the Surrealists and the Dynaton artists, a movement that grew out of Surrealism and the war with the aim of restoring the power of optimism and possibility. She numbered among her close friends Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford, founders of the Dynaton movement. Like Parker, Paalen and Ford both hailed from Europe and were driven into exile by the war. During her life, Parker assembled a vast collection of artworks, those of her friends and like-minded contemporary artists. Several paintings from her collection are also on view in a back room.
The influence of Paalen’s playful use of color and form can be seen in Parker’s more abstract paintings (e.g., Untitled above) utilizing, as Boas noted, “the Dynaton signature of a complex, sinuous, fluttery vision of space, inner psychology, and the otherworldly.” Yet, it was not enough for Parker to pay homage to her mentors. She delighted in taking work several steps further—a distortion here, a sweep of gut or wisp of silk there, leaving her signature creative playfulness on every surface she touched.
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Gertrud Parker: “The Possible” @ Marin Museum of Contemporary Art through March 31, 2024.
About the author: Lis Bensley is an award-winning author of the novel The Glimpse about artists of the Abstract Expressionist era. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The New Mexican, ArtNews, Elle Decor, Fine Cooking and others. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.
Photos: Caitlin McCaffrey.
