Abercrombie deployed a concise visible lexicon of non-public symbols and a restrained sober palette throughout her work of interiors, landscapes, and nonetheless lifes, which had been strewn with on a regular basis objects and scenes—seashells, eggs, black cats, owls, snails, doorways, bowls of fruit, Victorian furnishings, naked bushes, and moonlit landscapes amongst them. Though mined from her goals with the help of psychoanalysis, her works are grounded within the actuality of her life experiences and emotional states (to not point out the flat Midwest panorama). “I attempt to make it actual,” she stated of her work. “I typically discover my work extra actual than the world round me.”
Abercombie typically inserted herself into that world, by turns tense, lonely, and punctuated with humor—as a cat, a determine in a witch hat (which she typically wore round her neighborhood), even a crescent moon. Every portray is a self-portrait of some type, factors out curator Eric Crosby, and deeply private, whether or not drawn from inside or exterior actuality. “Her goals had been very actual for her,” Crosby emphasizes, “and her makes an attempt to color them straight had been the undertaking of her work.”
She additionally discovered the implausible in the true. Her Demolition Doorways sequence, as an example, attracts its peculiarity from the precise salvaged wood doorways that fenced off development websites as Chicago’s predominantly Black Hyde Park neighborhood underwent city renewal within the late ’50s; they are often learn, the present suggests, as exhortations towards racist insurance policies that had been reworking her neighborhood.
Gertrude Abercrombie, Demolition Doorways, 1964; Illinois State Museum Buy
